Workday on Thursday announced the availability of new services for accounting and financial planning executives that aim to provide greater and faster insight into data.
Workday said its new Accounting Center, machine learning-driven predictive forecasts for Adaptive Planning, and additional functionality across its finance offerings will help customers drive insights and efficiency from operational data.
The Workday Accounting Center is designed to ingest operational data, assign it attributes, and transform it into accounting. According to Workday, this allows customers to manage operational and financial data from multiple sources with a single point of control across the enterprise.
Workday is also embedding predictive forecasting into the analytics engine of Adaptive Planning, its software platform for business planning that stems from its $1.5 billion acquisition of Adaptive Insights in 2018. With new machine learning algorithms, historical and current data are used to predict likely outcomes for revenue, expenses, and other variables to create a predictive forecast.
Meanwhile, new reporting capabilities in the software aim to make it easier to compare an ML-driven forecast against a planner’s forecast to detect potential problems. The predictive forecasting capability is available now to all Workday Adaptive Planning customers.
Additional updates include the availability of Discovery Boards for ad hoc analysis on real-time data from live Workday transactions, as well as the ability to publish plans from Adaptive Planning directly to Workday Financial Management and vice versa.
“We continue to deliver on our vision for the changing world of finance by expanding data transformation, self-service analyses, and machine learning-fueled processes to help finance leaders better navigate continuous disruption and change,” said Barbara Larson, GM of Workday Financial Management. “These innovations unlock the power of data in new ways, empowering customers with eye-opening insights that were previously difficult — or even impossible — to glean.”
