Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis solution. Instead of storing SNC’s data on a local server or on an individual employee computer, your planning-related data is stored on large, well-maintained, and regularly backed up servers. 

You and other users at SNC access your financial model from a computer or mobile device using a standard web browser. As a leading cloud service provider, Workday Adaptive Planning is serious about protecting your data. Regular backups, hardware redundancy, and industry-leading data access control keep your data safe and secure.

 

Versions

A version represents a particular financial scenario.  For example, a version can be current-year actuals, next year's budget, a three-year plan, or a what-if plan for evaluating the effects of a business transaction.

Most organizations use versions that cover a calendar or financial year.

Versions like that may be titled Actuals 2019 or Planning 2018. Most of the time, the structure of your accounts, organization, dimensions, and other hierarchies and tags stays the same between versions, but the data is different. There are two basic types of versions: Actuals versions and Planning versions. The Actuals version contains SNC’s actual financial results for a given period of time, like income and expenses from 2019. Actuals are records of things that happened. Planning versions are about possible things in the future. Planning versions may be budgets, what-if scenarios, or almost anything else you can imagine.

You can compare versions to each other. For example, you may create a report that compares your Actuals version data for one month to the planning version for that month’s budget to see how the numbers match up.

Accounts

Accounts hold data (both values and formulas). Although general ledger accounts are the most common type of account, there are other types of accounts available. The data in accounts is edited using sheets and can be viewed in sheets and reports.

Account types you may use include:

• General Ledger Accounts(GL accounts) include all profit-and-loss and balance sheet accounts and are used to hold entered or calculated plan values and imported values from a General Ledger or similar system. Examples include Revenue (i.e., Graduate Tuition) and Expenses (i.e., Non-Personnel).
• Metric Accounts include percentage calculations such as Gross Margin (%) or Net Income (%).
• Custom Accountscan hold any kind of formulas or numerical data or they can also gather information from other accounts, for example, total full-time headcount. You can then display these accounts on statements or reports, or use them to drive other accounts. With custom accounts, the values and formulas can vary from level to level and from version to version.
• Assumptionsare global planning assumptions that apply to all levels within an organization structure. These values and formulas can only be specified by users with administrative or top-level permission, but they are available to use in sheet calculations at any level.

 

Organization Structure and Levels

The organization structure often mirrors the structure of the organization with collections of levels that roll upward to one another. The following shows the Select Levels dialog, which displays an interactive view of the SNC’s organization structure.

Levels are a way administrators can control who can see what data. For example, in the org structure, the VP for Student Life would only be able to see information in the Safety and Security and other sub-levels under VP for Student Life as well as the sub-levels to those sub-levels (i.e., Parking Operations).

 

Dimensions and Attributes

Dimensions and attributes are both logical categories with lists of possible values (for example, a dimension called Employee Class may have values of Academic Staff, Adjunct Faculty, Faculty Administrative, and so on, and both are used to tag data so that it can be conveniently grouped into categories for access and viewing.

Dimensions and attributes serve different purposes. Dimensions categorize data itself, while attributes categorize groups of data, like accounts, dimensions, and levels. Because attributes categorize groups, they also have the effect of categorizing the data which the group categorizes, but data cannot have attributes assigned to them directly.

Dimensions are commonly used for:

• Tagging budget amounts with the appropriate fund (a dimension called Funds may have values of Non-Personnel, Personnel, Endowment, etc ).
• Tagging personnel by job title (a dimension called Title may have values of Associate Professor, Office Assistant, VP, etc.)
• Slicing enrollment numbers by class standing (FR, SO, JR, SR).

Attributes are commonly used for:

• Assigning / Associating values to a dimension that has a 1:1 relationship may be useful for reporting or limiting a list on a sheet such as the relationship between Level and Program.
• Creating alternate roll-ups for accounts for External vs. Management Reporting.
• Attributes can also be used for back-end calculations to reference particular members such as Degree Seeking or Non-Degree Seeking.

Both dimensions and attributes are created and managed by administrators, but they are often available to users doing data entry, building reports, and otherwise interacting with the data.

 

Sheets

Sheets are the primary interface for entering data. Sheets are where data is entered, stored, and analyzed. There are three types of sheets:

• Standard sheets have time periods across their columns, and accounts or levels down their rows. They are excellent for expenses and other basic data organization such as the sheet pictured below.
• Cube sheets are powerful, multi-dimensional sheets that can have any number of dimensions along the rows and columns. They are created using a drag-and-drop interface described later in this chapter.
• Modeled sheets are configurable and well-suited for a wide variety of purposes. They are ideal for personnel, capital, and sales planning.

 

Reports

Reports display data, but do not let you edit it. There are numerous types of report, and a wide variety of ways to slice, dice, and view data on them.

Reports provide various ways of looking at the data stored in your system. In most cases, data is not stored within the report itself. Data is stored in the database, and a report displays the data based on the way the report is set up. Reports are like windows into the planning database.

The same report can be made available to all us

ers, but each user, when opening that report, will see only the data to which they have been given access.