Streamlining financial planning and forecasting

Key takeaways

Financial planning and forecasting have become even more challenging and complex.

Workday Adaptive Planning can revolutionize key financial planning and forecasting processes.

The platform can streamline workflows, improve accuracy and enhance decision making.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, financial planning and forecasting have become increasingly challenging and complex. To maintain a competitive edge, organizations must embrace innovative solutions that streamline processes, improve accuracy and enhance decision making. Workday Adaptive Planning offers a powerful and flexible platform to deliver these capabilities and revolutionize financial operations.

Workday Adaptive Planning is an advanced enterprise performance management solution that empowers businesses to achieve greater efficiency, transparency and strategic alignment throughout their strategic business planning and reporting cycle. The platform enables companies to address critical challenges and transform financial processes with benefits including:

A centralized platform: Unify financial planning, analysis and reporting processes into a single, integrated platform
Real-time insights: Access up-to-date financial data and key performance indicators to make informed decisions
Advanced analytics: Leverage predictive analytics and machine learning to identify trends, forecast future outcomes and mitigate risks
Collaboration and workflow: Facilitate seamless collaboration among finance teams, business units and executive leadership
Scalability and flexibility: Adapt to changing business needs and scale operations as your organization grows

The power of Workday Adaptive Planning extends to several key business functions, enabling you to quickly make better decisions in areas including:

Integrated financial planning

Create accurate annual and long-range budgets aligned with strategic goals
Leverage operational metrics and performance drivers to deliver financial results
Automate routine tasks, such as data entry and report generation

Real-time forecasting

Monitor key business metrics and adjust forecasts as needed to respond to changing conditions
Improve accuracy and reduce forecast errors with greater transparency into market trends and leverage expert judgement from across the organization
Generate precise forecasts by using built-in AI/machine learning (ML) functionality based on historical data and performance

Scenario planning

Simulate different scenarios to assess potential risks and opportunities
Evaluate the impact of various decisions on financial performance
Make data-driven decisions with confidence

Reporting and analytics

Generate insightful dynamic reports and dashboards to track performance and identify trends
Drill down into detailed data to uncover underlying causes and opportunities
Share information seamlessly across your organization

Workday Adaptive Planning in action

Simply put, Workday Adaptive Planning enables your organization to create actionable insights and drive results. Centralized planning templates and assumptions streamline your planning, budgeting and forecasting, delivering enhanced flexibility and scalability to quickly address your critical challenges and deliver growth. Built-in AI and ML capabilities automate trend analysis and efficiently identify accounts with significant differences.

Successful clients:

Streamlining the budgeting process

Challenge

Manual, time-consuming budgeting processes that are common within many businesses limit overall visibility and control.

Solution

By implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, you can centralize the budgeting process, automate data collection, allocate resources and generate detailed budget reports to deliver faster transparency into the results.

RSM worked with an independent private wealth management company to streamline budgeting and reporting processes within Workday Adaptive Planning, enabling them to improve forecast accuracy and make more effective, data-driven decisions. RSM established a direct integration to the company’s Dynamics 365 Business Central enterprise resource planning (ERP) system so the finance team now automatically runs their required cost center reports based on a single source of truth and identifies variances to the budget throughout the month-end close process. Previously, these reports were very time-consuming, manually prepared spreadsheets, and only available to business leadership a couple of days after the month-end close.

The RSM team also established a centralized budget process within Workday Adaptive Planning to replace over 40 manual spreadsheet-based templates, leveraging driver-based models for workforce planning and travel, meals and entertainment expenses that leverage centralized assumptions (i.e., provincial employer taxes, per diem rates), an office leases model to track rent costs, and data entry sheets for all other costs and revenue.

Over 40 budget owners are now fully trained to enter their budgets directly within Workday Adaptive Planning, utilizing the process to guide them through each step and empowering them to dive into their financial results with self-service reporting. The finance team can track the progress of budget entries centrally and monitor results in real time, enabling them to have meaningful conversations throughout the process, rather than waiting for manual consolidations at the end, increasing engagement across the business and reducing the risk of errors due to version control.

Month-end reporting is now streamlined, and the time savings is used for deeper analysis to support the organization’s strategic growth. Additionally, visibility into the month-end numbers during the close has improved the accuracy of each month’s results by ensuring the team can identify missing journal entries and avoid post-period close adjustments.

When you are managing the budget process from within finance, it is important that you have time to engage various budget owners across the organization for their input and feedback. Company-wide collaboration is often the key to drive improved results. In this instance, it was very rewarding to have all budget owners buy in to the process we had designed for our client, freeing up the finance team to focus on critical conversations and understanding the impact departmental decisions have on the results.

Jen Harwood, manager, RSM Canada

Improving forecast accuracy

Challenge

Outdated data and manual calculations often directly lead to inaccurate forecasts.

Solution

Workday Adaptive Planning’s advanced forecasting capabilities create more precise and reliable forecasts for your business, enabling better decision making into course correction as needed.

RSM implemented Workday Adaptive Planning for a private bank to support their planning functions, including mortgage, deposit, sales, capital, liquidity and workforce planning. The solution improved financial forecasting and enabled better decision making. Through automation of the calculations, the risk of error within forecasts was greatly reduced.

Since the initial implementation, RSM has supported further development and enhancement of Workday Adaptive Planning as the client expanded their activities and changed their approach to certain planning aspects.

By establishing a centralized leadership dashboard for tracking key metrics, everyone is consuming the same information and trusted data to guide decision making. Financial forecasting is also improved by utilizing process development to blend external model outputs into Workday Adaptive Planning.

Creating trust in a centralized data source for planning company-wide performance goals is a critical element of our Workday Adaptive Planning implementation and enhancement projects. We worked closely with this client to help them build a solution that enabled self-serve dynamic reporting on financial and nonfinancial performance metrics, as well as enable a decentralized planning process that leverages a single source of truth for decision making across the company.

Carly Carpenter, manager, RSM US LLP

Strengthening the balance sheet and cash flow planning

Challenge

Outdated processes and systems can provide limited visibility into assets, liabilities and cash flow, presenting obstacles to growth.

Solution

Workday Adaptive Planning provides deep insight into the balance sheet and overall financial standing, enabling more effective long-term planning and confidence in growth goals.

RSM worked with an insurance company to centralize their balance sheet planning within Workday Adaptive Planning. The solution increased insight and detail, enabling the company to better process their investment information to help drive a long-term view of their cash flow and balance sheet position.

In the past, the company maintained a manual balance sheet strategy within spreadsheets, limiting visibility and forecasting.

When the RSM team worked with the company to centralize their balance sheet data within Workday Adaptive Planning, they enjoyed increased efficiency, consistency and access, and were able to align planning processes with best practices within the insurance industry.

RSM also created a process to centralize their detailed investment data that enabled the automation of reporting, as well as the ability to plan at a more granular level which provided greater insight to drive the long-term investment strategy. Pairing these insights with enhanced detail on fixed assets and automated revenue payments allowed the leadership team to have a holistic picture of their balance sheet and cash flow forecasts for shaping growth projections.

The insurance world is very volatile. By providing our client greater transparency into their investments and leveraging it for enhanced balance sheet planning, we helped them understand their financial outlook in order to make critical business decisions and empower the rest of the organization to move forward with supporting the growth strategies.

Kathleen Buelt, manager, RSM US LLP

Enhancing collaboration and decision making

Challenge

Many organizations operate with siloed financial teams, resulting in limited collaboration and information sharing.

Solution

By leveraging Workday Adaptive Planning's collaborative features, your teams can foster company-wide teamwork, improve communication and accelerate decision making, all to support the delivery of improved financial results.

RSM implemented Workday Adaptive Planning for an alternative investing firm to enhance reporting capabilities and connect to their revised ERP system to create one financial source of truth. Even with complex reporting requirements, the implementation led to increased efficiency, improved data accuracy and better decision making.

The RSM team reconfigured the core elements of the system to reflect the evolution of the business, including a new organization hierarchy.

The team also tagged the chart of accounts to enable reporting on alternative account hierarchies and assessed reporting on actuals. It implemented a multiversion approach to tracking actual data direct from the new ERP system separate from prior adjustments on historical data, as well as established an automated allocation for certain costs within the system.

The client can now report efficiently within Workday Adaptive Planning, eliminating the need for a manual spreadsheet workbook with complex links and several tabs. Depending on the report they are running, they require up to three different hierarchy structures which are now available seamlessly. Additionally, the solutions increased transparency into their management adjustments of historical data. By segmenting actuals into separate versions and implementing the necessary security restrictions, the client can enter and monitor adjustments in the system without losing their ability to tie their data back to the general ledger source data.

Workday Adaptive Planning has established greater trust in the data and saved the finance team time, which they can now spend on deeper analysis within the business.

When working as a finance business partner before joining RSM, there was always a need to manipulate reporting views depending on the audience which could be time-consuming when using static spreadsheets. To create an environment for this client where they can easily pivot the view of a report at the click of a button or drill through to more detail depending on if you need an executive or detailed view was great. It allowed for their finance team to focus more on collaboration across the company, sharing faster insights into the results.

Jen Harwood, manager, RSM Canada

Best practices for successful implementation

As demonstrated above, Workday Adaptive Planning is a powerful platform that can provide a host of valuable benefits to organizations across all industries. To get the most from the solution, your organization should take the following measures during the implementation process:

Define clear objectives: Clearly articulate the goals and benefits of implementing Workday Adaptive Planning when compared to your current state.

Involve key stakeholders: Engage finance, operations and IT teams to inspire buy-in and smooth adoption throughout the implementation.

Focus on data quality and integration: Prioritize data quality for seamless integration with existing systems and establish early trust in the centralized data.

Concentrate on change management: Develop a comprehensive change management plan to address user concerns and resistance.

Emphasize continuous improvement: Monitor performance, gather feedback and optimize processes to maximize the long-term value of Workday Adaptive Planning.

The takeaway

By harnessing the power of Workday Adaptive Planning, your organization can revolutionize your financial planning and forecasting processes. By streamlining workflows, improving accuracy and generating more extensive insights to enhance decision making, your business can gain a competitive edge and gain an upper hand toward driving sustainable growth in line with your strategic goals.

Ready to capitalize on the potential of Workday Adaptive Planning?

RSM’s Workday Adaptive Planning practice is dedicated to helping you streamline complex financial planning and reporting processes and achieve your strategic goals.

Start today

THE POWER OF BEING UNDERSTOOD

ASSURANCE | TAX | CONSULTING

RSM Canada LLP is a limited liability partnership that provides public accounting services and is the Canadian member firm of RSM International, a global network of independent assurance, tax and consulting firms. RSM Canada Consulting LP is a limited partnership that provides consulting services and is an affiliate of RSM US LLP, a member firm of RSM International. The member firms of RSM International collaborate to provide services to global clients but are separate and distinct legal entities that cannot obligate each other. Each member firm is responsible only for its own acts and omissions, and not those of any other party. Visit rsmcanada.com/about for more information regarding RSM Canada and RSM International.

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Streamlining financial planning and forecasting with Workday Adaptive Planning

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Key takeaways

The power of Workday Adaptive Planning extends to several key business functions, enabling you to quickly make better decisions in areas including:

Integrated financial planning

Real-time forecasting

Scenario planning

Reporting and analytics

Workday Adaptive Planning in action

Streamlining the budgeting process

Challenge

Solution

Improving forecast accuracy

Challenge

Solution

Strengthening the balance sheet and cash flow planning

Challenge

Solution

Enhancing collaboration and decision making

Challenge

Solution

Best practices for successful implementation

The takeaway

Ready to capitalize on the potential of Workday Adaptive Planning?

RSM’s Workday Adaptive Planning practice is dedicated to helping you streamline complex financial planning and reporting processes and achieve your strategic goals.

THE POWER OF BEING UNDERSTOOD