Mastering Organizational Efficiency | Enhanced Dashboarding, Reporting, and Collaboration

Marc Moskowitz: That's great. And I mean, well said, maximizing their data, being proactive, then reactive, having trust. How do we help our clients solve these challenges?

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, so we utilize Workday adaptive planning to create one centralized location that fp and a and end users alike can consolidate all their actual financial and operational data to marry that against their planning while all being orchestrated by the finance team in one streamlined location. And to present this Workday, adaptive Planning uses three different reporting tools that we're going to walk you through today, all to be used for different purposes. The first is going to be active dashboarding, which is used for trend identification or real-time planning. The second is self-service web-based reporting, which is used by end users for month-end variance analysis and things like that. And also separately ad hoc analysis by the finance team. And the final is what they call their office connect platform, which is an add-in to Excel that is designed for presentation and quality reporting to leadership finance committees or other interested outside third parties. And that's what I want to do now is take you there and show you that live in the platform. So I'm going to begin my screen share here and give this a second to pull up.

All right, so I think everybody's seeing it now. And so what I'm going to show you here, the first piece is this is the dashboarding tool, and just as a reminder, this is a mechanism that the core purpose is for c-suite, fp and a and budget owners to identify trends in real time while comparing actuals to plan to help quickly identify areas of focus. The first dashboard here is a high level scorecard that is used by the entire company with a variety of different KPIs and dashboards. The first you can see it may be different functions of revenue, cost of it, sold expenses. Just give a quick snapshot that can be either month to date or year to date. And the great part about this is you can even drill down on this information to get more granular by simply clicking, left clicking on the $6 million.

If I wanted to see this by my level department function, I can now get a quick snapshot into, okay, if I made $6 million for that period, what different functions made that up over time between development, membership, conference and product? And at the end of the day, all I would need to do is click the back button to get back to my original screen. And you could do that for any of these varying KPIs and metrics and everything can be seamlessly integrated from whatever your financial or operational systems that are there. There's no limitations to that and you can bring in whatever data or whatever granularity you may need that's going to be important to your association or organization. In addition to these KPIs, you can see I have a couple of scorecards here that are just very high level but very informational. The first being a natural scorecard that might look at your natural chart of account hierarchy that gives me revenue for the period or for the month to date, year to date, whatever costs, expenses, operational or non-operating revenue and expenses along with comparison variances, micro charting, so I can see the trends over time for those periods, whatever's going to ultimately be most important for me to see and all completely configurable.

The second is actually what we term 'em a functional scorecard where maybe I don't necessarily want to see my chart of account hierarchy, but I want to see a breakdown of what my expenses or revenues or various functions are by function or departments. So I can see here this is broken down by my various departments or functions, market growth, education and development, all different components, sg and a, whatever I may need. And you can see up at the top here, there's a variety of dashboards here and I'm going to kind of take you through each and walk you through 'em as we continue on. The first might be my high level statement of activities where maybe I'm using this for high level planning by account, by period, by department, or whatever's important to me, but there's not really any kind of driver based planning or re-forecasting that come into play.

What you can see here is there's amounts in green and amounts in black, which green is actual data that again, just as a reminder is integrated from whatever source system or systems that you're using seamlessly. Automated push button can run on every day or even more often than that if you want. And it allows you to do not only pull your a OP plan type of things, but also constantly reforecast by simply with the click of a button. You can continually overlay actuals in multiple periods as you continue to go through the months. So that just by seamlessly changing a button, you can overlay actuals for January, February to do one plus elevens, two plus tens, et cetera, et cetera. The next things I'm going to show you are going to be examples of more driver based planning models that if you remember from what I talked about earlier, this is more for real time trending and planning and analysis.

So the first is kind of a membership. So if you're an association that has members with dues and things of that nature, not only can we integrate all your financial data, but also any kind of operational data or metrics from whatever system, grant management system or other tools you may have that are managing those things. You can see, I can see total members, new members turned, you can split them out by regions if you're looking at things domestically versus internationally or any combination of aggregated data that might be important to you, member type standard premium, again, whatever's going to be there. We also have kind of a bar chart that might show me actuals compared to prior year along with a trend for my plan so I can see how I'm working over time. Very key. A little helpful keys, pads here that tell me what each piece I'm looking at are.

And even here, this is an example of a driver-based planning model that we're using where I can see I'm actually blending operational data from actuals and with plan where my ending fiscal year 23 might've been I had 15,805 members and it all rolls forward with expiring memberships, renewed memberships. I can plan for my new members that ultimately maybe I have assumptions around the rates, churn percentages and things that can generate the new membership fees I'm going to get. And I can even set up calculations to not only manage my cash piece for the cash inflow from the members that I'm renewing or getting new, but I can even set it to calculate so that I recognize that revenue over the lifetimes of those memberships, whether they're a year or any other period of time. The next one I'm going to come here and mention is contributions and grants.

And so this one has a lot more detail and also has good information. You can see again a bar chart with my trending of plan to actuals and how I'm trending there. Percentage of grants as a percentage of my whole, and again, like I said, we can bring in data and information at any granularity I want to achieve. So I can see here I've got things from my plan here that might have project broken down by things fun, broken down by things, the amounts and no start. And the really cool thing that I can do with adaptive, if I'm using this from a planning perspective, not only do I have different versions, I can actually create spinoffs of a main core version if I want to and start playing with the numbers to see if I really agree with what is going to happen. And ultimately if I do like them at the end of the day, I can sync them right back to my core budget or ultimately I could remove it.

So what I'm going to do here is create a new scenario. I'm just going to call it alternate and I'm going to create it and I'm going to hit yes to ultimately go to this new scenario. So what's going to happen here is there's a little sink underneath my core budget that I was working off of that tell me that it's a separate plan, but it's still connected to the original plan so that ultimately if I want to make changes or edits and sync them back, I'll be allowed to. So for instance, if I'm looking at one of my grants here, and I could see right now 69% of my grants are grant A, 25 or B, but let's say I was to flip grant A to grant D now and I switched this, I'm going to see this all change in real time by my plan because it's dimensional, it's aggregated, it's pulled in from, again, a grant management tool or something else. And the really cool thing is I can see that it highlighted this in yellow. It tracks all my changes from what was there from the original plan so that I can keep moving forward and ultimately know everything that I've changed. So for instance, if I now change my grant B to instead of 1.2 million, I might add a zero here and have it at 12 million. I'm going to see these all sink in real time and it all tracks my changes live in the tool and you could see my grasp, my bar charts, everything expanded.

The next piece I'm going to show you, and again that might be playing with funds, projects, whatever pieces of information are important in core to my organization. The next I'm going to look at here is my workforce planning changes, which is obviously a key expense to any organization. And everything here holds the same too. You can see I have a build out of my entire workforce planning and my budget based on not just high level numbers, but it can be based on my actual employee roster that's ultimately integrated from whatever my payroll system is, whatever you might be using. We have market growth, salaries, education, so I can get a sense of this. I have an FTE by function, I have a headcount trend. And again, just like I showed you on the contributions and grants management, we have the same changes that can apply to anywhere in here.

So I'm going to change this person to say $6 million in salary. And what I'll actually see is from that perspective, my education development and salary will jump way up. And once I hit save here, I could see, okay, now I went from 3 million to 8.1 million for the year. I'm very seamless, easy again, it highlights it in yellow and I know exactly what I've changed. So at any point in time I can decide if I like these changes, sync them back in or ultimately discard it and go back to my original plan. And just like this, even all my head count FTE functions are i'll calculated by this. So you can see right now I'm looking at this, I'm in November, but if I was to change this person and I instead say, no, you know what, I'm not going to start them till December, or maybe I even say nope, now I'm going to wait till next year to bring this person on.

I'm going to see this drop back down and I'm also going to see my head count change or my FTE change from 32.99 and you can see it dropped one because now I'm no longer starting this person. This person will no longer be starting in November, but they'll actually be starting in January 25, so my FTE dropped. And also you can see here, not only am I able to have that ability to do these things, I can split people between multiple departments such as Charles Dickens here. I'm actually splitting him across multiple departments because maybe he doesn't work for one organization but switches it to many different components of the organization in different departments. And so we split his time and allocate those resources down very easily and efficiently. And then not only can we do things with contribution and grants, revenues, memberships, workforce planning, everything can be customized in the tool.

So if I wanted to track software, I can actually get a sense of software and again, active dashboarding around that where maybe I have prepaids or things that I'm going to say, Hey, I want to spend $20,000 on this subscription for a year and I want to spread that expense over 12 months. We could do those types of calculations. I can track these things and these are probably kind of my favorite graphs and charts in the workday. Adaptive planning dashboards is these waterfalls because they give me a very quick view on the things that are relevant to me to where I'm at actuals compared to my plan. And I could dive in very quickly to see where maybe I'm over or under budget so that I can go back to the correct resources and get an understanding of what's actually happening and discuss, Hey, what's going on here?

Do we need to alter our plans? We need to make strategic alignments for the future to ensure that we're keeping up with our budgets and our plans. Same thing with this is professional fees. This might be technology. And again, you can see I can track things not only when we talked about grants or projects or some of those things. I can budget my expenses by vendor, by project, by grant. All of this data can then be, again, seamlessly pulled in from any source system to compare actuals to plan at a very granular level so I can get the information to the end users who need that to be able to make more proactive decisions in their environment. And again, maybe a lot of associations usually have annual conferences. So you can actually have a very detailed planning model for those conferences. And this might be similar graphs and charts that I'm used to looking at it, but I can see here I'm tracking for my annual conference or any other things where people are going, maybe what the conference fee is.

And you can have assumptions built around what the different various costs might be for transportation, for lodging, for whatever meals, whatever things are going to cost money that then calculate out. And I can look at, hey, the number of days, times, what the lodging rate is and get a sense of that exact expense and calculate that out to ultimately push to my plan for future periods to make sure that I'm capturing everything that I need to. Or for instance, I might be able to do a simple capital plan where maybe if I'm a capital intensive organization, I can input various amounts for maybe I'm building out a new building or where else where I can track all the expenses that go into it, push it into a CIP for the time being, and then ultimately once it actually goes into service, I could even move that from CIP into the relevant asset category account and trigger that depreciation to all have it calculated automatically for me in the system.

So that's all the dashboard and components. The next component I want to jump into and show you is ultimately the web reporting here. So next is also an in component tool, and then there's two kind of key reports that I want to show you. The first is going to be our current month expense variance report. You can see there's a lot of things going on here, but I have a year to date amount a month to date, the year to date amount my actuals compared to my working budget, and I can do all sorts of conditional formatting with highlighting and various things to really call out for my end users what the expense accounts or things where maybe they missed their plan to budget to have them help them kind of drill into that detail and get an understanding of what maybe happened. So for instance here, maybe I'm reviewing my month end budget and I could see, oh, my meals was over by 556% for the month.

Well, that doesn't seem right to me. I can actually click on this 19,915 that would be pulling from whatever perhaps my ERP would be or my GL system. And not only do they have a wholly functioning audit trail, whereas people make changes and edits to the system, if I notice something looks different than it did a previous day, I can go and review that audit trail to see what may be changed. I can actually bring in all the transactions from my source system so that no longer does that p and a or accounting have to send end users, department owners a comprehensive GL detail. If they don't have access to the gl, they can get that just simply by diving into the tool. And I can see that if I extend this out to 1000 here, that 19,915 is a component of all these different transactions that are in the system. And this is completely customizable and configurable to the components of the transactions that you may want your end users to have as long as it's in the gl, you can push it into adaptive to give your department owners or your budget owners the most information possible so that they can make the best decisions possible for whatever they might need to do.

And then again, it's very simple, very easy. You can have all sorts of dropdowns and levers. So if I wanted to change it to a different month by the click of a button, we can run the report and now it'll give me April, or if I go back to February, it might give me February and I run that report. I get that. The next report I want to show you is not only can we do kind of basic expense and p and l reporting, you can also ultimately do full three statement models. So at a high level, we have fiscal year 23, fiscal year 24 budgets, but I can see my p and l here. Basically a lot of the same information you might've seen in the other report except for that was only expenses. But the great thing that you can see here is not only do they have the p and l data, but they ultimately have the balance sheet data where I can see a full fledged balance sheet, my assets, liabilities, I can look at all that information, I can get a cashflow with my various operating activities, investment activities, financing activities, all the way to tie back to my ending cash balance.

I could have separate reports for these. I can put them all in the same report just like I'm showing here, which you can get a lot of information packed into one tiny report. And ultimately, not only is it all GL data, but as I talked about, we can pull things from any kind of operational source system where I can look at various metrics ratios. I can set up cash ratios, current ratios, debt ratios, maybe all these metrics are just completely financial based where I'm looking at just one account compared to another, but I can also blend any kind of statistical data I may want that's going to be relevant to my organization. For instance, here's a revenue per employee, a cost per employee, but any calculations you want to set up and standardize to give the people information that they need to have, you can pull this into the tool and standardize your calculations to put on reports to give them all the access they need to look at in real time and make decisions more proactively.

The final tool I'm going to show you here now is ultimately going to be our Office connect tool, which this is again as a reminder, a presentation style reporting tool where you can cleanly format and use all the power of Excel, not only to create reports and create board decks and things of that nature, but ultimately you can even set it up to format using all the Excel functions. And if I change the date here, so if I have a fully, you can see all the tabs I have and I want to change this to March, I simply change my date to March. And if I hit refresh all sheets, I'll notice that this will all update in real time. So not only does it help you completely conform and set up and standardize, make your month end board packages at the push of a button at the end of the day, all those panic changes if you have your board deck ready to go and you're looking to set everything up, oops, there we go.

So I can see everything kind of changed in March, but what I was getting at here is not only is it great for just standardizing your reporting, but any last minute changes maybe, Hey, I've got all my board decks things and stuff and set ready to go, but what happens at the end of the day is some people make some last minute changes and all of a sudden I'm panicking to make sure I'm updating everything to make sure that it's set and ready to go and accurate in terms of where we're at, well now because everything's fully automated and integrated into Workday adaptive planning, everything is push button. So for instance, not only does it work with Excel, and I can see it changed all of my different tabs here, product sales, revenue by product, everything got changed. You can actually even connect it to PowerPoint so that my PowerPoint, my board decks are all seamlessly set up synchronized and ready to go. So again, just so you can kind of see that in real time, if I change my workbook properties back to say February and I want to update this and I hit okay now when I hit refresh again for all sheets, not only does it change this, but you're going to see this change in real time once that updates as well.

I can't see it behind it. Oh, second, why is this stuck? Oh, there we go. Whoops. So there we go. Now everything updated and I can see now all my PowerPoint decks are back to February. So I've got my February functions, and again, this is not only great for just kind of repeating my month end month after month, I can have everything set up and then maybe I just make some basic commentary on things. It's great for those last minute changes where maybe in the past I've panicked and had to make sure I've got all the new data sets in, I've got all new graphs and charts I've got to pull in because numbers have changed slightly. You don't have to worry about that anymore. Everything that's in the tool here from the accounts, the times we talked about various dimensions and things that you might have all can be pulled into the system real time into Excel. And so I have all the power of Excel with all the power of adaptive, and there's no limitations to the information you can bring in at whatever aggregation you might need. It completely and seamlessly works together.

So thank you and I appreciate you taking the time to watch this from me today.

Marc Moskowitz: Yeah, Kyle, appreciate that. So we do have a couple questions coming in the last few minutes we have together and appreciate you showing us how we can be proactive and have a dashboard that really tells a story in 30 seconds or less, but more importantly is actionable and forward looking. So the theme of a variety of questions, I'm going to bundle 'em all in one for you, is around how do we get data, data from our general ledger system and our payroll system and our A MS systems and Salesforce, if I'm using that for CRM into adaptive planning so they can use that to not only tell what's happening now, but use it as a driver for forward looking planning.

Kyle Nesslar:

Yeah, so Workday Adaptive Planning has a fully synchronized integration tool that can get data from a variety of sources via Excel, via a cloud-based connector that uses the open API of whatever system you may be using. We can do all sorts of connections through JDBC, which is sql, Oracle based everything. Any information that you have in a system we can set up and dashboards use, whatever we need to completely synchronize it, pull that in at whatever level of aggregation you might need.

Marc Moskowitz: Great, great. We got a couple of questions coming in regarding an implementation. What would a typical implementation look like in the number of weeks and maybe phases?

Kyle Nesslar: Yeah, so typically a foundation with actuals and reporting would take anywhere from six to eight weeks to set up. So getting that basic foundation for, again, those core pieces of information that are going to be important to you if it's departments or entities or funds or maybe you want to pull in things like vendors or customers or things like that. And then to set up all that reporting is about six to eight weeks. Then if you want to do some p and l planning, things like that, that's typically another four weeks to get that all set up so that you have your core driver based planning, workforce planning expenses, other expenses, revenues. So from a foundation just to get you up and running with reporting, you could be ready in again, less than two months.

Marc Moskowitz: Excellent, excellent. And I'll take this last question and for those that we didn't answer to questions, we'll follow up with you following this webinar. But this question is saying that we're in the middle of doing our year end planning. How can we get in touch with you to learn more? And my answer to that is that our team will be proactively reaching out to all of you following this webinar as well as I'll turn it to you, Astrid in a second here. But our contact information is there as well. And we're happy to spend some time with all of you understanding where you are today, but more importantly where you envision planning and reporting to be in the future. So we really appreciate your time today. Astrid, back to you.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}