Unlocking Collaboration with Workday Adaptive Planning

Want to drive innovation, growth, and predictability within your organization? The answer is collaboration! 

Leading companies are embracing modern FP&A technology to foster company-wide collaboration. Tasks traditionally seen as the sole responsibility of the Finance department, such as financial planning, are now evolving into collaborative projects that engage individuals across various departments.   

However, building a truly collaborative finance function is often easier said than done. FP&A teams frequently struggle with time constraints, lack of direction, or insufficient clarity around metrics, which hampers their ability to forge the cross-functional relationships needed to enhance forecasting and reporting. What should be a collaborative effort ends up as a siloed Finance exercise. And, when discrepancies arise, Finance generally takes the blame, leading to a loss of credibility as a trusted business partner. 

Planning is a Team Sport 

Does this scenario sound familiar? You’re working on a spreadsheet for hours and when you finalize it, you realize that another team member or another department has been making edits in a different version. Now you must start over with the hope that other versions aren’t being updated. Hours have been wasted. Updates aren’t tracked. There’s no single source of truth. Not an ideal situation for anyone and definitely not a collaborative process. 

How can you encourage collaboration with other departments? The first step is to empower your business partners by giving them greater ownership and accountability over the data and the overall process. Many companies still rely on spreadsheets for forecasting and planning, but this approach is not only inefficient and prone to errors—it also isolates information until it’s shared. 

Collaborative finance fosters stronger relationships with stakeholders by involving them in the financial planning process. This engagement leads to better communication, understanding, and alignment with stakeholder expectations. Once cross functional teams shift from “you” to “us,” teams can move past debating numbers to collaborating effectively on the best path forward. When teams work together, they can quickly align on new strategies and implement changes more efficiently. 

Fast Fact: 88% of Workday Adaptive Planning customers have been able to take a more strategic approach to their role 

The Power of a Single Source of Truth 

Achieving better collaboration starts with moving away from static spreadsheets and outdated, on-premises planning tools. Instead, get everyone on board with a cloud-based planning platform like Workday Adaptive Planning that offers one trusted set of data and reduces the amount of transactional work that Finance teams handle daily.  

A collaborative approach to planning increases transparency across the organization and with shared access to financial data and KPIs, everyone is on the same page, fostering trust, and reducing the likelihood of misunderstandings. 

Fast Fact: 93% of businesses using Workday Adaptive Planning accelerated their forecasting/budgeting cycle-time by 30% or more 

KeyPoint Credit Union Uses Collaboration to Empower the Finance Team 

KeyPoint Credit Union has benefited from increased collaboration thanks to Workday Adaptive Planning. With role-based permissions and a single source of truth, it’s easy to collaborate with stakeholders and ensure that the appropriate level of information is provided to various collaborators.   

Trent McIlhaney, the former CFO at KeyPoint Credit Union shared, “Instead of emailing spreadsheets back and forth, [Adaptive Planning] allows for the bottom-up approach with regards to departmental managers. Our process involves somewhere around 25 users that are entering information for their operating budgets. We’re able to customize for each of the areas of the budget whether we want that to be a collaborative bottom-up process or top-down.”  

You can read the full KeyPoint Credit Union case study here. 

Final Thoughts 

When Finance teams collaborate with other departments: 

• they gain new insights and ideas that can lead to innovative solutions and approaches 
• data is cross-verified and validated, reducing errors and inconsistencies and leads to more accurate financial reporting and forecasting 
• quicker adjustments to financial plans can be made in response to changing business conditions 

Ready to see how Workday Adaptive Planning can help drive collaboration within your organization? Schedule your personalized demo!