One of the features that makes Workday Adaptive Planning so valuable for so many clients is the ability to have many different planning and actuals versions. The ability to plan for different scenarios provides FP&A teams with the flexibility to provide the board or other senior leadership with accurate forecasts instantly, and it is generally a good practice to lock a version once the period has passed to compare it against future actuals and budgets. However, we often have clients reaching out with requests to identify why their locked versions have changed. In today’s installment, we will provide a few common causes for the changes and solutions we’ve found helpful.
What Changes?
When a change happens, you first need to identify what change, the actuals or the plan? The kind of data that changed will be telltale of where you should look to identify the issue.
Actuals Changes
If your actuals have changed, it’s possible that some of the elements that hold data (level, account, dimension, etc) have been deleted or an individual cell was changed. As a result, the intersection in the locked version no longer exists or the data was changed. There are two solutions to this kind of error. The first is to keep backups of each version to allow users to reimport from a point in time. The process would be tedious but would result in data integrity. Additionally, Workday allows for instance restoration for a fee starting at $800. These backups would restore an instance up to 30 days into the past.
Another common cause for a change of actuals is if a level is cloned by mistake. This would result in a duplication of the data in the levels. Fortunately, if this is the case, the duplicate levels can simply be deleted. Additionally, these levels can duplicate plan data.
Finally, another common cause for the change is if actuals change in your source system. Although actuals are closed and should not change, adjustments happen, especially in smaller private companies. As a result when running the integration, the data changes. Although it is not best practice to change actuals, it is recommended that Workday Adaptive Planning stays up to date with the source system. This can be done by rerunning the integration or creating an actuals child version called adjustments. Adjustments can then be made to the actuals within this version and the totals aggregated at the top level.
Plan Changed
If values changed in planned versions, then it is likely the case that some formulas were changed and applied to all versions. When adjusting formulas there is an option to “disable version-specific formulas,” this applies the formula to all versions, including locked ones. Assuming you remember what the previous formula was, there are ways to override formulas within specific versions. This occurs on the back end of the sheets.
Misconceptions
When a planning version is locked, what is actually happening is users in the system with limited access are no longer able to enter and edit data in the version in question. Additionally, the actuals will continue to feed the version, meaning that any changes in the actuals will be reflected in locked versions. In order to ensure that your locked version does not change, navigate to versions within the modeling screen, select your version, and navigate to Access Control. Here, be sure to select “Locked Version” and “Calculate Formula Values”. This will calculate all the formula outputs, and save them as values to ensure no changes… unless you delete an account/level.
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