“We are a fast growing and expanding global business that needs to be able to respond and act quickly. It was tedious extracting and importing data every time we needed to refresh our actual financial information in Workday Adaptive Planning for reporting, analysis and forecasting. The manual process was proving unsustainable for us in the long term so we took an automated approach with Tridant’s Xero Connector, and now we can load actuals on a schedule or refresh data on demand in 10 seconds” CFO, Fliteboard, Australia
At Tridant, we are often approached by CFOs keen to grow their FP&A team’s operational efficiencies - reduce resources spent on manual accounting, manipulating data and other tedious manual tasks every month - and empower their teams to focus more time on strategic planning and growing the business.
All businesses must use some sort of accounting and finance ERP system such as Xero, Workday Fins, NetSuite, SAP, or another platform. Those platforms typically do not come with built-in planning and reporting solutions, so either Excel or more sophisticated performance management tools like Workday Adaptive Planning are leveraged to complete that part of the monthly lifecycle process outside of the ERP.
Organisations that manage a business via solutions like Workday Adaptive Planning, must have a concise way to shift data from the finance ERP system to the planning tool. Luckily Workday offers built-in integration capabilities that allow the platform to retrieve and send data automatically to your source and target systems.
To streamline and simplify the task, Deepak Gupta, a Senior Consultant with Tridant, has built an easy-to-deploy package for integrating Workday Adaptive Planning with Xero. After a one-time set-up, planners can utilise pre-written API scripts at the click of a button or import on a schedule without any manual effort to import data from entities managed in Xero at once.
With Adaptive, there are essentially three main options for importing data with respect to the level of effort involved:
Diagram 1: Effort Spectrum for Integration Approaches
Custom Cloud Data Source (CCDS) connectors are part of the Adaptive Integration module, and this type of connection allows Adaptive Planning to shake hands with other cloud systems without any on-premise installations. At the same time, the Xero Developer platform enables businesses to create their own Apps that control the target systems with which Xero is allowed to communicate.
Once the Xero App is set up, those credentials can be used to create the connection in Adaptive Integration. The connector supports OAuth and uses parameters for passwords and client secrets to make sure access and credentials are secure.
In Adaptive, loaders are configured with mapping profiles to import data such as transactions or balances as well as structural data. They can also be designed to automatically export data if required.
Using Integration Tasks, loaders can be set-up to run as often as you want, streamlining data flows from sources to Adaptive dashboards and reports.
Automating the integration process allows planners and analysts to spend less time shifting data back and forth through spreadsheets and spend more time focusing on the business.
| BENEFITS OF THE TRIDANT XERO CONNECTOR |
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* Adaptive Integration should be included in your existing Adaptive Planning subscription. If your license subscription does not already include the Integration module, Tridant can work with your Workday client executive to get this function added for a fair cost.
CCDS connectors can be leveraged to source data from all systems that allow connections via API. Other common connections may include:
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If your organisation is using Xero and Workday Adaptive Planning, let’s chat about how Tridant's Workday Adaptive Planning Integration with Xero can help your team save time every month.
Do more with less. Grow your operational efficiencies and focus limited resources on accelerating top-line growth.
Authors:
Deepak Gupta, Senior Consultant, Tridant
Alyssa Brennan, Head of Product & Consulting Assets, Tridant
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