Budgeting and Planning System

ASU’s Office of Planning and Budget (OPB) operates and maintains the university’s enterprise budgeting and planning system. ASU implemented the current system, Workday Adaptive Planning, in November 2020. Workday Adaptive Planning is a user-friendly, flexible application with integrations from Workday Financial Management System (Workday Finance) and Workday Human Capital Management (Workday HCM). The Workday Finance integrations keep Workday Adaptive Planning in sync with Workday Finance regarding metadata (e.g., revenue categories, spend categories, cost centers, programs) and actual revenue and spend data. 

Workday HCM integrations provide a daily salary snapshot of position and employee data used for updating salary input sheets for budgeting and forecasting purposes. The Workday Adaptive Planning system facilitates robust position planning, including budgeting and forecasting, with comparisons to prior year and current year actuals. The application features intuitive ad-hoc reporting with a drag-and-drop interface for quick and easy HTML reports. Furthermore, the HTML reports allow users to drill into the data to explore the details behind the aggregated data featured in various management reports. Budget units may use Office Connect, an add-in for Microsoft Excel, for more complicated reports.

Budget units use input sheets to enter salaries, revenues, revenue distributions, transfers, and expenses for budgeting and forecasting, while OPB uses a central planning sheet in the system for institutional funding commitments to budget units. In contrast, all these sheets feed a suite of pre-built reports, maintained by OPB, that allow budget units to see their budget and forecast inputs pulled together into formats that make analysis more intuitive and manageable. A customized feature of the system is the ability to allocate funds throughout the organization – from one level to the next level down – without losing the source of funding. This feature enables the user to produce management reports for sub-units that show the sources used to fund various activities within that smaller organizational area.

During the annual budgeting process, OPB loads each unit’s budget from Workday Adaptive Planning to Workday Finance; this allows users to compare their budget to actuals in both the budget and planning application, as well as ASU’s financial system of record.