Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting coming January 2024

In August 2023, Modernization and Deloitte announced their collaboration to develop a new grants forecasting tool, called Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting, for WSU. We are excited to provide the following update, including a planned launch date, for this new resource.

Modernization would first like to thank the members of the WSU community who provided valuable input, examples, and subject matter expertise which shaped the vision for Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting, particularly Colin Pappajohn and representatives from the College of Medicine, CAHNRS, and College of Vet Med.

Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting is the first university-wide grants forecasting tool, enhancing support for research on a brand new level. The tool is intended to assist Grant Managers and Principal Investigators (PIs) across the WSU system in projecting future expenses and remaining balances on their grants. View a video demonstration of the new tool here.

The new tool utilizes Adaptive Planning to allow Grant Managers to update budget and expense projections in order to forecast remaining balances on individual grants, and view forecasts by Award, Grant PI, or across a whole Cost Center. PIs will be able to access the tool to view this data, helping them to plan spending for their grants.

This new tool allows users to:

  • View more accurate salary and benefits forecasts than what is available in Workday, including automatic forecasts of workers’ benefits and salaries based on individual worker benefits rates and for the entire costing allocation period.
  • Manually edit FTE or rates for hourly workers to include hourly worker wages in projections.
  • Add projections for expenses that aren’t committed or obligated in Workday, such as anticipated ISD or p-card transactions.
  • Project F&A expenses based on projected direct costs, or choose to continue to use Workday’s F&A obligation of the unspent balance in the F&A budget line.
  • Use the tool to experiment with “what-if” scenarios, such as “How would hiring another grad student impact my remaining balance?”

We currently plan to release Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting for all Grants Managers and PIs on January 10, 2024. Training is available for Grant Managers and PIs beginning in December. For more details, and to register for training, visit Percipio. Employees may also review the new Workday Adaptive Grants Forecasting for Grant Administrators guide in the Workday Knowledge Base.

Following launch, the tool will be maintained by the Modernization team, and data will be refreshed on a monthly basis to support timely and accurate forecasting activities.

We are excited to offer this unique new tool to support research at WSU. We will continue to provide updates as the project progresses on the Modernization grants news page and in the Workday Digest.

Questions? Reach out at the Workday Service Desk.