This product assessment is based on a synthesis of 6 recent reviews of Workday Adaptive Planning, examining overall satisfaction, areas for improvement, ROI, and impact on business processes. Workday Adaptive Planning is primarily used for budgeting, forecasting, and financial planning. A significant benefit reported by users is its ability to facilitate real-time budget changes and understand financial impacts immediately; 5 of 6 reviewers cited budgeting and forecasting as a core use case. The software also supports data and reporting, with 3 reviewers highlighting its ability to generate reports with minimal manual intervention, streamlining yearly budget processes. Users also value the platform's ability to act as a single source of truth, centralizing input sheets and updating reports in real-time as data is entered, impacting the budgeting process positively for 3 of 6 reviewers. However, some users (2 of 6) find the user interface and dashboarding/reporting capabilities need improvement, suggesting the UI could be more intuitive and offer greater formatting flexibility. Additionally, 2 reviewers noted data input processes could be complex, potentially affecting the overall ROI. Despite these challenges, Workday Adaptive Planning offers substantial time savings, cited by 3 reviewers, and improved decision-making, noted by 2 reviewers, making it a valuable tool for organizations focused on efficient and informed financial planning.

Pros

Enables real-time budget changes and impact analysis.
Streamlines reporting with minimal manual intervention.
Acts as a single source of truth for financial data.
Reduces time spent on budgeting processes.
Improves decision-making through better data visibility.

Cons

User interface and dashboarding can be unintuitive.
Lacks flexibility in formatting and mass updates within dashboards.
Data input processes can be complex.
Requires simplification and ease of navigation, potentially with fewer tabs.

Why it matters:

A majority of reviewers (5 of 6) use Workday Adaptive Planning for budgeting and forecasting. Reviewers appreciate its ability to facilitate yearly budget processes, quarterly forecasting, and overall financial planning. The system allows users to model budget changes and see the immediate financial results, which is seen as a game changer.

“We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting.”

Why it matters:

Half of the reviewers (3 of 6) highlighted the time savings achieved through Workday Adaptive Planning. These reviewers indicated that the system streamlined their budget cycles and generally saved time for leaders. The time savings appears to be a significant factor in the perceived ROI.

“Cut our budget season from over 2 months down to less than a month”

Why it matters:

Data and reporting capabilities are also valued, with 3 of 6 reviewers mentioning this aspect. Reviewers appreciate the software's ability to generate reports with minimal manual intervention. They also utilize it for reporting and dashboarding purposes, as well as for yearly budget processes.

“We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting.”

What positive or negative impact (i.e. Return on Investment or ROI) has Workday Adaptive Planning had on your overall business objectives?

From 6 reviews

Summary

This report synthesizes 6 recent reviews to assess the return on investment (ROI) of Workday Adaptive Planning. Reviewers most frequently cited time savings (3 of 6 reviews) as a positive impact on business objectives. Improved decision-making was also noted as a valuable benefit (2 of 6 reviews). However, some reviewers (2 of 6) mentioned challenges related to data input processes, which could potentially detract from the overall ROI. The reviews suggest that while Workday Adaptive Planning can offer significant benefits, users should be aware of potential data input complexities.

Top Quotes

Time savings

“Cut our budget season from over 2 months down to less than a month”

Improved decision making

“Ability to use forecasts and scenarios has made decision-making much cleaner and faster”

Data input issues

“Negative is time constraints and disconnect on data inputs in Workday Adaptive Planning vs an exce”

Describe how you use Workday Adaptive Planning in your organization. What are the business problems the product addresses and what is the scope of your use case?

From 6 reviews

Summary

This report synthesizes 6 recent reviews to understand how organizations are using Workday Adaptive Planning and the business problems it addresses. A primary use case is budgeting and forecasting, cited by 5 of the 6 reviewers. These reviewers appreciate the ability to make real-time budget changes and understand the resulting financial impacts immediately. The software is also used for financial and operations planning to understand expenses, revenue, and margins across departments. Data and reporting is another key area, mentioned by 3 reviewers. They value the software's ability to generate reports with minimal manual intervention and its utility in yearly budget processes.

Top Quotes

Budgeting and Forecasting

“We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting.”

Data and Reporting

“We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting.”

Please provide some detailed examples of areas where Workday Adaptive Planning has room for improvement.

From 6 reviews

Summary

This report analyzes six recent reviews to identify areas where users see room for improvement in Workday Adaptive Planning. A significant area for improvement revolves around the user experience, with 2 of 6 reviewers mentioning challenges related to the user interface and dashboarding/reporting capabilities. These reviewers suggest that the UI could be more straightforward and intuitive. They also desire more freedom in formatting and mass updates within the dashboarding and reporting functions. The need for a more user-friendly experience, potentially with fewer tabs, was also expressed by 2 of 6 reviewers, indicating a desire for simplification and ease of navigation.

Top Quotes

Dashboarding and Reporting

“Dashboarding capabilities (UI more straightforward & intuitive; More freedom in formatting/mass updates)”

User Interface

“More user friendly experience sometimes less tabs”

Workday Adaptive Planning is designed for the quick intake of data, easy construction of models, and efficient surfacing of insights to enable continuous, company-wide planning at scale. How, if at all, have Workday Adaptive Planning’s capabilities impacted your organization’s business processes?

From 6 reviews

Summary

This report analyzes six recent reviews to understand how Workday Adaptive Planning impacts business processes. A key benefit cited by reviewers is its positive influence on the budgeting process. Specifically, 3 of 6 reviewers mentioned improvements to the budgeting process. These improvements include reduced time spent building budgets and streamlined processes with end-users accessing data and reports in one place. Relatedly, 2 of 6 reviewers describe the platform as providing a single source of truth, centralizing input sheets and updating reports in real-time as data is entered.

Top Quotes

Budgeting process improvement

“It has significantly reduced the amount of time we spend building our budget.”

Single source of truth

“Single source of truth.”

Reviews

220 Reviews

A great planning platform for all size of companies.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 28, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for financial and operations planning. We use it to understand the overall expense across the departments, revenue, margin, etc. We use the software as its no-code application with minimal manual intervention required to generate reports.

Pros

generation financial reports
clearly defined data points and numbers
simultaneous report collaboration.

Cons

training on how to generate the reports to new users.

Likelihood to Recommend

Report generation, simultaneous collaboration on reports, visibility into numbers and metrics.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Sales (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Workday Adaptive Planning Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 17, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Workday Adaptive Planning is a very great way to moderate, aim and assess skill levels for each employee throughout the calendar year, my company specifically uses Workday Adaptive Planning to assay yearly and monthly goals and ways to improve not only workplace flow but personal skill set and improvement. Workday Adaptive Planning focuses on changes in work stations and in company policy and the assessment that employees are working on it.

Pros

great format for skill set aiming and improving
user friendly for each employee in the workplace
Great for management to manage perform routine checks for teams and goals

Cons

More user friendly experience sometimes less tabs
less complicated homepage format

Likelihood to Recommend

It helps with aiming at goals that are constantly changing, more specifically the way supervisors can manage and continually update there teams goals and skills is very useful and great tool for improvement. But the problem is that sometimes the website can be very complicated and hard to navigate with certain layouts where you implement your goals.

Jared Hunike

Lab Tech 2 in Manufacturing at Integrated DNA technologies (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

On-the-fly Reporting and Consolidation

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Workday Adaptive Planning since 2017 across two industries (airport and staffing) and I have been amazed of their improvements since then. Working on Excel models and using Access to consolidate multiple branches was a pain and time sucker. I currently do all planning of revenue, COS and operating expenses including personnel in Workday Adaptive Planning and the up-to-date financials as soon as users input their data has been a game changer. I highly recommend Workday Adaptive Planning as your forecasting and budgeting software.

Pros

Consolidation
Modeling
Forecasting

Cons

Security in levels

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are planning for multiple branches (at least 10) and revenue streams, Adaptive Planning will be perfect for consolidating actuals and budget and reporting on-the-fly.

Camille Bueno, CPA

Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis in Finance and Accounting at Eastridge Workforce Solutions (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Workday Adaptive Planning is the future of budgeting!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 28, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our yearly budget process and some reporting. Workday Adaptive Planning allows our users to make budget changes and see the net result of the changes immediately. This helps to get us to our target budget more quickly. We plan to utilize the active dashboards within Adaptive for even more real-time data and how it affects the overall organization.

Pros

It's ability to update and process changes to accounts or formulas immediately across multiple sheets
The ability to link accounts to a summary page makes data easier to pull to different sheets
The flexibility with different sheets and the security to allow or not allow visibility

Cons

Having an Average function in the formula types, currently I have to use a range and divide by that number
Ability to delete data in Standard account boxes from one version to another, rather than having to manually delete
Working with teams that implement Adaptive to ensure they are setting up the model for ease of using the Publish Plan functionality

Likelihood to Recommend

I think that Adaptive Planning's "live" updating is a huge improvement from our prior software where we would have to do a full update overnight that took hours. With the real-time updating our leaders can budget much more quickly because they are able to see the impact from one sheet to another immediately. I think the dashboards and reporting capabilities are great also. Using Office Connect along with Adaptive Planning has been incredible. Having the ability to have a spreadsheet that can be updated with the click of a button is fantastic!

Danielle Arnold

Senior Workday Analyst in Finance and Accounting at Altru Health System (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Workday Adaptive Planning Review.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 9, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At the University of Washington, we can engage multiple stakeholders to perform their FP&A functional operational work and participate in other projects that extend beyond Adaptive Budgeting data. By utilizing Integration Management, we can create APIs with Adaptive data, allowing for bidirectional inbound and outbound transfer of strategic data to external applications. This supports initiatives that are broader than just Adaptive, all while leveraging the Adaptive platform to drive the technology behind these projects. Adaptive is a versatile tool, akin to a Swiss Army knife, enabling various applications.

Pros

Data Transformation within Integration Management.
Modeling Complex FP&A Consolidated Financial Statements across any industry.
Story telling the number across HTML, OfficeConnect, and Active Dashboards.
Active Dashboards.
Anomaly Detection (Outlier Reporting).
Unified Access Management (one Security Model).
Power of One.
RAAS reports with Prism Analytics.
RPA Orchestrator configuration.

Cons

Data Volume for Large Enterprises (memory consumption on Loaders/instance).
Robust Dashboard functionality.
Cube Limit of 15k rows.
OfficeConnect.
EIP

Likelihood to Recommend

Adaptive is the best holistic EPM tool if you invest in and upskill your Team to truly adopt the Power of One.

Alfonso J. Díaz Manrique De Lara

University of Washington in Information Technology at University of Washington (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

Workday Adaptive Planning Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

November 19, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FY Budget Planning, Quarterly Forecasting, Reporti & Dashboarding

Pros

Systematizes Budget data
Nice Visuals

Cons

Dashboarding capabilities (UI more straightforward & intuitive; More freedom in formatting/mass updates)
Reporting Capabilities (UI more straightforward & intuitive; More freedom in formatting/mass updates)
Integrations with other systems (WSS)
More straightforward guidance when integrations fail
Details behind confidence metrics in predictive forecaster

Likelihood to Recommend

It's a good starter system for any org that's coming out of a manual environment. The base capabilities are good but there's still much improvement on both basic & advance functionality needed

Verified User

Team Lead in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

From Excel Hell to Continuous Forecasting

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 8, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our business units use 4-5 different accounting systems. Workday Adaptive Planning has allowed us to move from Excel hell in consolidating these reports every month, to relatively seamless corporate wide reporting. Additionally, we have moved from a one-time annual plan which always tended to be out of date before it was finalized and the new year began, to continuous forecasting giving management foresight into what is to come and scenario planning to guide potential impact of options. We can create versions and see potential outcomes in minutes now instead of days.

Pros

Versioning
Multiple Models
Live Updates
Office Connect (Excel integration tool)

Cons

Menu bar - sub-menus based on model instead of all being listed together
understanding how formulas work.

Likelihood to Recommend

We were able to integration and utilize Workday Adaptive Planning in a very short window. The models have been easy to understand thus increasing end-user adoption. The Office Connect feature allows users to easily create their own reports, in Excel (the comfort zone of all accountants) without having to wait on an Administrator or technical report writer.

Scott Luchenbill

CFO/CIO in Finance and Accounting at Agility Defense & Government Services (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Workday Adaptive Planning REview

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 1, 2024

Pros

Driver-Based Budgeting
Real Time Reporting and Dashboards
Scenario Planning and Modeling
Integration

Cons

Integration with Non-Workday Systems
Training Documentation

Likelihood to Recommend

In our business model rates play a big role in our scenario analysis. Adaptive allows for analysis of multiple versions which is ideal for us when we create numerous scenarios based on different rates.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Awesome Workday Adaptive Planning!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Here at Capitalize we use Workday Adaptive Planning internally to budget and forecast monthly on current consulting projects as well as expenses and revenue for the overall organization in finance as well as down to the practice areas.

Pros

Scenario Planning
Financial Planning
Forecasting
Flexible Reporting

Cons

Demand Planning
Extended Planning

Likelihood to Recommend

I think the ease of use for our finance and ops teams that don't need to have someone very technical to use and admin is a big plus. It also has a lot of flexibility when it comes to reporting, which allows our org for great insight at the fingertips.

Verified User

Director in Finance and Accounting (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

I see the potential, but could use some work

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 27, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We primarily use Workday Adaptive Planning for annual budget planning, quarterly re-forecasts, and general financial management and reporting practices. We used incredibly manual processes to conduct financial management and budgeting practices before and Workday Adaptive Planning has allowed us to expedite and optimize this process. We still have not harnessed the power of workforce planning due to HCM and Workday systems and processes, so far, but are hoping to utilize Workday Adaptive Planning to its full potential for long-term modeling, predictive forecasting, and workforce planning in the future.

Pros

Budget management
Single year budget planning and forecasting
Reporting and dashboards

Cons

User design, functionality, and friendliness
Reporting functionality and features
Multi-year planning and modelling

Likelihood to Recommend

Workday Adaptive Planning has been great with single year budget management and re-forecasting. We have mostly had success with user adoption. We have experienced pain points and frustrations with multi-year planning and long-term modeling. The instances we've built out and tested have not resulted in the efficiencies and optimization of resources we would have liked or expected.

Verified User

Director in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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