Here we demonstrate best practice tips for managing versions within Workday Adaptive Planning, present use cases of Virtual Versions, and show you how to set these up for optimal reporting.
Version Management
Folders are extremely useful for organising your budgets and/or forecasts. You can use them to group versions by type of version, or financial year. It can also be useful to create an archive folder for retired scenarios.
Once you have finished a plan, it is best practise to lock the version using the Access Control settings. This ensures no one else can make edits to the version. Ticking calculate formula values also helps reduce loading times as values are pre-calculated on locked versions.
Virtual Versions
Virtual versions can be used in two different scenarios to help optimise reporting and analysis. Most commonly, virtual versions are used to enhance reporting by removing the requirement to re-point existing reports to the latest budget or forecast version.
As you can imagine, having to re-point every single report each time a new budget or forecast version is created is quite cumbersome and time consuming. With virtual versions, the virtual version, commonly phrased “Current Budget” or “Current Forecast” is re-pointed once in the model, and then all reports referencing the current budget or forecast will be updated accordingly.
To see this in action, watch the video by QMetrix consultant Joanne Thien, or continue reading below.
How to create a virtual version in Workday Adaptive Planning
- From Model Management, Select Versions and Create a new virtual version
- Provide the version with a name such as Current Budget or Current Forecast. You can control the access changing the access control properties from locked to hidden, or just leaving the property at default. You cannot plan into virtual versions which is why “locked” is commonly selected.
- Under the Virtual Version Options, repoint the Base Version to be the latest version. Now any report that is referencing Current Forecast will show April Forecast values.
- Each time there is a new forecast version, the base version can be repointed and all reports that are referencing the current forecast will be updated accordingly.
The second use case for virtual versions helps multicurrency environments with analysis whilst excluding FX rate fluctuations.
Virtual versions allow you to use the data from one version, for example actuals, and apply the exchange rate of another, for example budget, and therefore remove rate fluctuations. This allows you to analyse variances whilst ignoring foreign exchange fluctuations.
Within the virtual version details there is an exchange rate property. By editing this, we can repoint the exchange rate version.
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