Platform: Workday Adaptive Planning and Power BI
Scope: outbound exports of expense actuals, forecast and budget
The business problem
The reporting team was building a budget versus actuals report in Power BI. They needed expense data from the planning model as files, by version, for every month from the start of the prior year to the end of the next budget year.
Existing architecture
Several expense models in Workday Adaptive Planning held actuals and the live forecast. Exports wrote files to an SFTP folder, and Power BI read the files from there.
Why it happened
The export process had not been checked against the full reporting calendar. Some delivered files lacked required months, and reported amount differences had not yet been separated into source, export or BI calculation causes.
Design decision
We treated period coverage as its own check, separate from whether an export task finished. A finished task does not prove that every month reached the folder. We also added spend category code and name to the financial exports, so the report could group expenses without a second lookup file.
A large headcount export was also planned. The reporting team confirmed they were not using it yet, so we deferred it and did not build files nobody would read.
Implementation approach
- List each export with its version and the months it must cover.
- Run large exports in monthly batches and keep a timestamp in each file name.
- Compare the months in the SFTP folder with the list, file by file.
- Rerun only the missing months and keep the files already delivered.
Controls and validation
For the number differences, we set out a reconciliation of the report base data against the export by account, cost centre, version and period. That separates an export problem from a report calculation problem.
Outcome
The requested export files and missing periods were delivered, and spend-category attributes were included where required. Validation of the consuming Power BI calculations remained a separate activity.
Lessons learned
- Verify the files in the folder. Do not rely on the task status.
- Agree the period range per version before the first run. Budget and actuals rarely need the same range.
- Ask whether a large export is used before building it.
Scope of the outcome
Requested export files delivered; downstream Power BI calculations remained a separate validation step.
EPMLogic | Implementation insight based on an anonymized scenario. Exact operational amounts and client details are intentionally omitted.
