Watch this demo of Workday Adaptive Planning – an enterprise financial planning software that enables organisations to collaborate in real-time on budgeting, forecasting, and strategic modelling to drive faster, data-backed decisions.

In this video, Adilah Sawawi, Principal Consultant at QMetrix, showcases foundational concepts and key features in Workday Adaptive Planning. This demo includes:

• Fundamentals of Workday Adaptive Planning – introduction to sheets and core concepts like versions and forecasts
• Basic planning – OPEX planning and ad-hoc schedules
• Driver based planning, with workforce planning as an example
• Reporting features, including dashboards and web reporting
• Q&A from participants, addressing Workday Adaptive Planning cost, integration, usability, and Power BI compatibility

Watch the Workday Adaptive Planning demo below:

Here is a full transcript of the video:

Jarred Grek speaking: 

Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining. We appreciate you attending today’s session. Please feel free to drop a few questions in the Q&A or chat box and depending on time we’ll try our best to answer during the webinar or one of QMetrix team members will follow up afterwards.

I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Jarred Grek and I’ll be your host today. In my role at QMetrix I talk to finance teams like yours about the challenges they’re facing and how best we can solve them through technology. 

We’re also lucky to have Adilah here with us as well today. She’s a Principal Consultant at QMetrix. She started her career in Microsoft technology. She then spent the last 12 years plus in the space, which included managing, implementing and delivering solutions for clients. Her experience does cover both pre and post sales, as well as being a practice manager and mentoring consultant, so we’re in safe hands as she goes through the demonstration shortly.

About QMetrix and our partnership with Workday

A bit about QMetrix. We’re passionate about what we do in delivering positive outcomes for our clients. Really the purpose of today is to allow you to get an understanding of Adaptive Planning, as well as how we approach the FP&A challenges that you’re experiencing. 

The goal is to help you reduce the frustration in Excel spreadsheets, legacy systems, as well as enabling you to budget, forecast, and report in a more effective manner. This will, in turn, help you as a finance team to free yourself up, with added value on value added tasks, as well as allowing you to be more strategic in your role.

And that’s what truly excites us. We’re a passionate team and we love what we do, and that really translates to the successful projects and outcomes we have for our clients. We’ve been certified as a Great Place to Work, which just further validates that we’re partnering with. You’re really partnering with an organisation that values its peoples and culture with a strong principles and is driving standards across all levels.

This is a team photo of us volunteering at a at a local community center, cooking for meals for those in need. And that’s just a true testament to the values that we hold within the organisation. Now, how do we achieve that? How do we achieve these positive outcomes? Well, firstly, we’ve partnered with a market leading organisation and tool, Workday Adaptive Planning, and we’ve partnered with them for seven years now.

We currently hold a platinum status and a preferred validated partner status, which is the highest level you can attain as a partner. (2026 Update: QMetrix has been awarded Workday Adaptive Planning APAC Partner of the Year in 2024, 2025 and 2026). And the reason why I’m mentioning that, is it is just a true testament to the ongoing relationship and support we have with Workday. But most importantly, it’s the reflection of the number of successful implementations as well as the support we give to our clients.

This next point is just a short list of some of the organisations that we’ve worked with, both on the larger scale and the small scale, but it really just highlights the different industries and businesses that we are able to leverage the best practice and some of the processes that they might be using to enable you in your organisation and address some of the challenges that you might be experiencing.

Workday Adaptive Planning demo overview

Now, just before Adilah jumps into a product demonstration, this is the brief agenda. Adilah will first share the fundamentals, which will introduce the core concepts about Adaptive. She’ll then go into basic planning, followed by driver based planning and reporting. As I mentioned before, please do jump out if you have any questions in the chat box, and we’ll endeavour to answer them within the session or shortly after.

Adilah Sawawi speaking:

Hi, my name is Adilah and I am, as Jarred mentioned, one of the Principal Consultants with QMetrix. Today’s demonstration is just a very quick 20 minutes introduction to what is Adaptive Planning. So I’m just going to straight dive into it.

Adaptive Planning is a cloud based solution. It is Software as a Service. As you see here, access through depth planning is through web browser and everything is done via the browser. We’ll touch on the (Microsoft) Office component; we can touch on it later on in a different demonstration because there is a very strong integration there. We’re looking at some dashboards here on the screen, and we’ll come back to them a little bit later when we touch on the reporting aspects.

Demo – core concepts and basic planning

I want to first dive into planning. So we’ll dive into the fundamentals of Adaptive where everything is driven from what we call the sheets menu here. And if you think of sheets as replacing Excel spreadsheet models with the same level of modeling capability, but in a very secure or collaborative manner. 

In this example, we have sheets that support our financial statement drivers, our revenue expenses such as travel, capital planning, workforce planning, and other kind of sheets that you might include in your budgeting and forecasting process.

Most driver based models will have assumptions, and they can be set at any level, such as the global level or country specific levels. You can have workforce planning assumptions like pay increases or tax rates. Financial statement drivers like data days outstanding, days payable outstanding, and any drivers you may use for your three way forecast. 

Now these sheets, they can be interconnected. Making a change is simple and it will calculate across the entire model. 

Let’s first start by having a look at our profit and loss sheet. It is basic or fundamental in a sense that all of your data, your budgets, your forecasts, your actual needs to lend into your profit and loss. Up the top here we have what we call versions, and we’ll use the term versions or scenarios in the change play.

These versions can be locked or hidden from users from viewing or inputs. We’re currently logged on as an administrator, so we can see all the logged and hidden versions so we can have versions for your actuals, top down versions, various cuts of your bottom ups like your budgets and your forecast versions for your what-if scenarios, and even for intelligent planning.

We’re currently looking at the working budget version, and if I look down below it, we have what we call our level structure. And you can think of this as your organisation structure, where you can organise by entities or business units, right down to the profit or cost center. 

Level security is tied to the level structure, so users can only see what they’ve been given access to. And when a user logs in, they only see the cost centers or the templates or the sheets that they’re responsible for. So currently we’re looking at the working budget version and we’re looking at sales north for the United States. We can drill into a different entity. For example, let’s say we want to have a look at Sales Melbourne – we can click on Sales Melbourne, and that will bring up the slice of the sheet for Sales Melbourne. 

Now currency is also tied to the level structure. So if you’re operating in multiple currencies we can configure currency to each element of the level structure. On the left hand side here we have the GL account. And we typically set this up to mimic what is in our financial system.

And we’re planning by month here. You can plan long range over multiple years. This is actually a 24 month plan. I’ve just hidden the 24/25 months for this demonstration. So once you’ve set this up, you can deploy this sheet quite quickly and start to collaborate with your team. Get them contributing either by upload, copy and paste, or entering data directly.

You can of course preset this data with last year’s actuals. Apply and uplift, or start with zero base budget. Say we’re looking at the finalised budget here and we’re well into the year, and we want to cut a new forecast version. Forecasting is key these days, and we’ll show you how easy it is for us to cut a new version and get our users to adjust their numbers and finalise our forecast.

Now up the top here, I’ve created a new forecast version called April 2024 forecast. I’m just going to switch over to that right now. And if you look at the April version, you see that we’ve actually overlaid our actuals up until March. So the fonts in green actually specify that it’s actual. And we have we have used the working budget as the basis of our forecast.

Now let’s have a look at how we might enter data into our profit and loss. Some of the cells you see here, the greyed-out cell – and this tells us that they may be coming from a more detailed driver based planning, or it can be a calculated account. But in a more basic form, the cells in white, you can key into them.

So let’s say we have identified some new training expenses in our coming months. I can update this template and key the data in directly into those cells. But what I can also do is we can create new lines within our set templates and what we call splits. So I can right click and add a split and say, I want to categorise this expense as an OH&S training – and you see that creates a new line for me down there. If I know I have a new training issue initiative in the coming months, I can add a new split and say, I have a mental health first aid training coming up – we can add that in. That creates a separate line for me within my set template also.

So now we can go in here and we can see in the numbers within the templates. So if I go in here and say I’ve got $5,000 that I want to spend for my mental health first aid training, we can do that. So with this functionality, you can get quite detailed and scheduled if you like. And the most important thing here is it doesn’t break someone else’s template.

So some another user in a different cost center – they will not see the splits that you have made for your cost centers. If you want to keep things in at a full year amount, you can do that as well. So if you identify maybe $15,000 budget for your legal and professional services, you can keep that in your full year total. Hit enter and it will tell you how you want to break that number back so you can choose proportionally or using priors values.

You can also choose any assumptions that you have created or any drivers that you have created within your model. I’ll use proportionally using price values, and that breaks the number back into the months that have actuals, last year, considering what I have already spent for the year.

You can also add things like notes. So if I right click here and add a note, I can say budget set at 15k, hit okay. And that gives me a red flag up the top right hand corner and tells me that there’s a note. So there’s forms of narrations that you can add into your set templates as well.

Another important thing also, or another powerful function within Adaptive, is that you can create formulas or users can create their own formulas. So say for example, my mental health first training there, if I want it to be a formula instead of just an indirect input, I can just simply do an equal sign here. And this is a little bit like Excel where you type in equals and you can reference maybe a driver that you have within your sheet or a driver within other sheets.

I can highlight that cell. And up the top here you can see the formulas starting to build up. And I can say I want to multiply that by maybe $50, hit enter, and that tells me that it’s a formula. I can copy that forward. And once that’s changed, you see that all the cells that’s in blue, that tells me that it’s been changed and I think it hasn’t been saved yet until I hit save here.

And when we click save, the values then get saved and it gets rolled up into the consolidated level. The currency conversion also happens automatically. Also, as an FYI, every single cell its audit track, any changes when and by home is all tracked behind the scenes.

Another quick way of planning I want to go through here is that you can quickly pivot this information around. So if I select my telephone expense and I want to view it by level, this changes my view or pivots it in a way that now we have all our all of our level structure, our profit centers, our cost centers down the left hand side.

And at the top here we have our account selection. So you can drill into a different account if you need to. A very good way of sending the checking or making whole scale changes in that sense. 

So that was a very quick fly over of what I want to show you from a basic input point of view in our profit and loss. 

All of those features, you’ve just seen this straight out of the box. Once you’ve set up your elements, your GL account, your organisation structure, you can start to collaborate with your users and get them to start entering data in this raw form. And they log in, they get access to their respective area of business, and they focus on what they’re responsible for. And in the background, the consolidation and currency translation happens automatically. 

(See additional resources on Workday Adaptive Planning modelling here.)

Demo – Driver based planning

So now we want to move on to driver based planning. And here is where things can start to get a little bit more sophisticated when you’re not planning just by keying in financial numbers, but also by building things from the ground up using some true drivers.

So we’ll have a look here at our salary and wages numbers. And in most organisations, people’s costs can make up quite a big part of the organisation’s expense. So I’ve identified my salary and wages line here. And you can see that it’s greater in log from input. I can right click and explore the cell, and it tells me that there’s a formula in that cell and how much it’s evaluating up to.

I can click on that formula. And here you can see the breakdown of that amount by individuals. Obviously you can lock this down where only users with salary privileged access can see the breakdown of individual salaries. Otherwise they can see the total number. And the best part of this drill through is that it tells me where the numbers are coming from and from which sheet exactly.

So here it tells me that it’s coming from the workforce planning sheet, and I can click on that link and it brings me straight into that sheet. So that’s how they hang together in the background. We have various sheets and they’re the building blocks of our model. So that’s just another sheet that you can access also through the sheets menu here.

Another good thing here is that it also brings through some intelligence. It knows which version we’re in, which version we’re playing around with, from our profit and loss and which cost center we were looking at. 

Now, in this demo, we have configured our indirect labor to plan by individuals, either by name or by positions or role ID. Obviously we can source these from your HR systems in the first instance, get it loaded into your plan version, and then you go ahead and adjust your assumptions – who’s going to get a pay rise or a bonus. So if you know of anybody leaving the business you can keep that in Adaptive as well. 

So the sheet is a little bit different from the profit and loss sheet, in that we can capture things like text and dates as well as numbers in the columns. And these columns are fully configurable and we can configure them based on your organisation’s requirement. 

So I’m just going to quickly add a new role here. Or I’m actually just going to copy an existing row. So I can just right click and copy the row, and that creates a new row for me. Within this model sheet, change some of the drivers here. I’m just going to leave everything as it is. Maybe I’ll change the plan to start from the 1st of June, and we can tweak some of the salary numbers. 

Now at the end here, this is where things can get a little bit more complex, where if you want to get right down to specific and you’re allocating employees to individual cost center by percentages. Like for example, if Wilson here, she’s a 60/40 split between the Melbourne and Sydney Cost Center. But keeping in mind, though, that if it’s an entire shared service that you’re allocating out, there is also a whole allocations module that where you can allocate the cost of your finance or HR, it back out to the profit centers based on your desired drivers, such as headcount or revenue.

That’s all out of the box as well. That’s largely what I want to cover I’m going to hit save here. That’s largely what I want to cover from a planning point of view for this demonstration. 

Demo – reporting with dashboards

And we’re now going to quickly pivot over to reporting, where we’ll cover dashboards and web reports.

Dashboards play a very important role here in the planning and analysis process. You know, ad hoc analysis of numbers, they’re great. But sometimes it’s faster and easier to investigate things like trends and exceptions visually. These dashboards, they’re interactive, and it is an integrated feature of Workday Adaptive Planning, so it’s not a third party add in that requires any kind of complex integration.

We can easily deliver the right dashboards to the right audience. And the dashboards I see, and the data that I’m viewing in this, is based on my access rights. So I’m immediately focused on what’s important to me. Here we are viewing the latest financial results as compared to plan in a wide variety of layouts, from things like traditional lines to columns and to scorecards.

You can include things like waterfall charts as well for analysing variances. Like I mentioned earlier, the dashboard is there, interactive and you can drill into it. And let’s say, for example, we want to know what’s been selling and who’s been buying. We can further drill into, say, our products revenue for March actuals. 

Let’s say I want to drill into by product. This tells us the breakdown of the revenue by product and what’s our best selling products in here. We can further, of course, drill this into – maybe one is see the split by customers. This breaks our product one revenue by individual customers. And this tells us that customer one is one of our biggest buyer of the product. 

Now the dashboards in Adaptive – it’s not just about reviewing data. Users with the right privileges can also enter data directly. I’m going to switch over to a different dashboard here, and I’m going to hit refresh. And here, as you can see just now, we have included our workforce planning sheet that we saw earlier on in the demonstration into this dashboard. So it can include things like matrix columns, charts as well as the sheets that you have built within Adaptive in the dashboard as well.

So here we see the numbers – the new employee that we wanted to add in our forecast – and I can go ahead and make the adjustment here. So let’s say I want to delete this row. I can right click and delete the row and hit on save, and then we can see all of our numbers in our charts being refreshed automatically once we’ve made that change in our sheets.

Demo – reporting with web reporting

Now I’m going to switch over to web reporting. So web reports here are accessed through the reports menu. I’m going to pull up a version of this report called the current one Expense Variance Analysis. You may have a similar version of this report where we are reporting on our current month, our year to date, and you might have a full year segment as well.

Here we have accounts here down the left hand side, and we are comparing between two versions. You can select the versions at the top here. So here we’re looking at actual versus budget, and we’ve got the variance columns that are calculated. The droplets at the top here, they are live. So you can drill down into a different cost center or a different version if you want to compare that as well. And this will bring up the slice of the data for the selection that you have made.

You can also set up things like conditional formatting where you can highlight any kind of excessive variance. And also another key feature here is also the ability to be able to drill into this information. So if we see a large variance here, for example in our other T&E, we can drill into that where we can click on it and we can drill that into by level to see where the variance is coming from.

So here quite quickly we pivot information to have all the cost centers that has the variances or the data within them. And this tells us quite quickly where the variance is coming from. So you see sales North here has an actual of 2.6 million. And that’s caused the excessive variance. And what we can also within this screen, what we can also do within this screen is that we can drill into that data.

And if I click onto my actual number here, this pulls up where the data is coming from. And I can drill straight into transactions if you have transactions connected to Adaptive. And this brings up all of our transactions that we have put into Adaptive. And here we see that someone’s in that number there or someone’s going out to have a really nice lunch. The important part here is users can actually triage and explore where the numbers are coming, coming from.

So for some of our clients or for quite a lot of our clients, they found this tool to be very useful where servicing their people at month-end used to be very time consuming. But with this functionality, they give the ability or the ownership back to the users to be able to investigate without having to rely on the finance team and waiting to get an answer.

And with the dashboard and the reports that you see here, you can construct them as as you like. It’s all using drag and drop. With some training, our clients, most of them fully own and maintain the reports within Adaptive themselves. 

(See additional resources on how to use Workday Adaptive Planning dashboards and Workday Adaptive Planning web reporting.)

There is also a very powerful and easy to use Excel module for board reporting and for finance teams. We are more than happy to take you through that demonstration if you reach out to us, or you can stay tuned for the next webinar episode. 

So I’m going to pause here because we’ve gone through what we want, what we’ve discussed on our agenda. We went through the fundamentals and the key concept around sheets and assumptions, levels, account security, cutting a new forecast version, how we plan, we consolidate as well as report.

Hope this gives you a good first look into a Workday Adaptive Planning. And I’ll hand this over back to Jared and we can go through the Q&A. Thank you.

Jarred Grek speaking: 

Awesome. Thank you Adilah. Appreciate that. 

Workday Adaptive Planning facts

Just to further validate what Adilah has shown so far, it’s really common functionality found in many of the top tools. But really what sets Adaptive apart is a few things which I’m going to touch on in a moment. 

Now, really the first one is it’s backed and trusted by a significant large customer base. Around 6,500 clients globally trust Adaptive, and that’s almost 700 within Australia and New Zealand. Secondly, it’s backed is what we call system agnostic. Adaptive Planning allows you to integrate into any system, so you have that safety and the future proofing in the ability that Adaptive will make constant. Whereas your other systems and as your organisation changes and grows processes, you have the confidence that Adaptive will remain the same and can still talk to your new systems.

The next point is upgrades. It’s an important part because it can add to the total cost of ownership of a new system. With Adaptive, there’s at a minimum two upgrades per year at no additional cost. These upgrades are typically done overnight in the back end and don’t interrupt regular business, so that’s an important part. On top of that, there’s a really a low reliance on internal IT support for these upgrades, if none at all.

Lastly, it’s independently validated by Gartner for their financial planning software quadrant as a leader. Again, further validating Adaptive as a leader in its field.

I just want to thank you all for joining today. I hope you found a session informative. Obviously, you can always reach out to us if there’s any of the other concepts you want to jump into. 

Question and answer about Workday Adaptive Planning

Cost of the solution

I’ll just pick off some of the Q&A. So thank you for asking. There’s a few questions here, and I know I’m touching close with time here. The first question is: what is the cost involved?

It’s a good question. So as I mentioned it is a SaaS product. With that comes in annual subscription based on a user count. Secondly there’s typically a one source implementation cost where QMetrix would come and implement the the software, along with many other things that we offer as part of being in the family. But typically it’s a one off implementation. So those are the two costs that you can factor in with the software.

(Explore more information on features, functionality and costs in this article: A guide to selecting the right FP&A solution.)

Integration with other systems

The next question is: does the solution integrate with payroll and non-financial systems? Yes. As I mentioned before, (Adaptive) the system agnostic, so it has the ability to consume both financial and non-financial data. Adaptive can integrate to third party solutions. And also we’re in a unique position at QMetrix where we’ve got a team that’s solely focused on data integration.

As you know, if you’re experienced in implementing a new system, there are many different ways you can integrate to third party solutions. So we’ve got a quite a wide range of experience internally that we can help, depending on what you need to be talking about. 

Maintaining the solution

Do I need to rely on consultants to maintain Adaptive? No. That’s a very good question. One of the key value points of Adaptive and what sets itself apart from other solutions is it’s usability.

As part of our approach, we really want to train and upskill your finance team. We really want you to have the confidence in Adaptive but also the confidence to maintain the system. So everything that Adilah showed you can be maintained by you – the reports, the modeling, which we haven’t touched on in the session. But Adaptive is really an ease-of-use tool to be managed by the finance team. 

Yes, we have some clients who rely on us for, you know, expertise. But typically the finance team can run and manage it. It’s that type of system. 

Integration with Power BI

I’ll just try to answer one more question: we use power BI, can Adaptive Planning use it as well? Another good question. So Adaptive as I mentioned can integrate to third party systems. Your power BI, your visualisation tools like reporting, Tableau or any other ones – Adaptive can complement and work alongside it. 

Typically there’s there’s often use cases as to why you’d be using a power BI or those visualisation tools, and we’d query what you’re using them for because as Adilah showcased, Adaptive does have that reporting and dashboard functionality there. But to answer that question, yes, Adaptive can integrate into a Power BI or the likes type of tool, and they work quite closely. We’ve got some clients leveraging power BI and Tableau for the reporting and visualisation part.

(Get a detailed breakdown on the differences between Reporting & Analytics tools vs Financial Planning & Analysis tools in this article: Workday Adaptive Planning versus Power BI.)

I think that’s kind of closes out with one minute to spare. I just want to thank everyone for joining. If you do have any other questions, I will follow up individually for those questions I couldn’t get to, but please do reach out to us if you need anything else and we hope to see you at the next webinar series. Thank you.