Workday spans finance and HR with real-time planning tool

Workday Planning is designed to be used in combination with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM). The result is a unified system that allows organizations to continuously create, collaborate and take action on budgets and forecasts without the need for outside tools, Workday said.

A budget generator in the new product, for instance, allows companies to combine historical and budget data with modeling assumptions to generate a baseline budget automatically.

Collaborative planning features, meanwhile, give teams a secure place to create models and scenarios that they can share and edit with operational managers to finalize a budget or forecast. Collaborative worksheets combine familiar spreadsheet features with an interactive grid experience.

Finally, built-in analytics and reporting tools are available to help teams execute on the budget, track actual results, perform budgetary controls and measure organizational performance. Based on that insight, they can then adjust plans and forecasts continuously within the same system. A CFO, for instance, could access a dashboard for a quick view of variances in actual values versus targets, drill down for a better understanding of root causes and then make adjustments accordingly.

Workday Planning is the company's answer to customer demand for such a tool, said Leighanne Levensaler, a senior vice president at Workday. "This was one of our top requests from customers," she said.

The new tool will be generally available next year as an optional add-on to Workday's HCM or Financial Management systems. Pricing details have not yet been announced.