Enterprise FP&A is not a private capital decision system.
Workday Adaptive Planning (formerly Adaptive Insights) is an enterprise FP&A platform — budgeting, forecasting, and consolidated planning at the operating-company level. Capital Refinery is the structured record of the GP's investment decision across the life of the position. They sit at completely different levels of the stack.
What Adaptive does well, and where the line is.
What Adaptive is built for
Enterprise FP&A: budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, planning.
A mature cloud planning platform built for the operating company finance team. Driver-based budgets, rolling forecasts, scenario planning, and consolidation across business units. For a portfolio company CFO, it is a strong choice — and many sponsor-backed companies run it as their planning system of record.
What it is not built for
Holding the GP's investment thesis after IC approval.
Adaptive lives inside the operating company. It models the budget and the forecast at the OpCo level. It does not know what the IC decided at entry, what assumptions the deal team relied on, or which KPIs were intended to test the underwriting case. The GP-side decision record is a different object — and Adaptive has no schema for it.
Where Capital Refinery sits next to it
Above the OpCo, governing the position over time.
The most common pattern: the portfolio company runs Adaptive for its planning. Capital Refinery sits above it at the GP level, ingesting the actuals and the forecast, mapping each KPI to the entry assumption it tests, and producing decision validity across the firm's full portfolio. The two are complementary, not competing.
Where the lines fall.
| Capability | Workday Adaptive | Capital Refinery |
|---|---|---|
| OpCo budgeting and rolling forecast | Strong — core capability | No — different layer |
| Driver-based planning and consolidation | Strong | No |
| Domain model for the GP's IC decision | No | Yes — first-class object |
| Structured investment record at IC | No | Yes — bound at approval |
| Operator data → entry assumption mapping | No | Yes — the data model |
| Cross-portfolio decision validity ranking | No | Yes |
| Covenant + breach probability for credit positions | No | Yes |
Your portfolio companies will keep Adaptive. The question is what governs the GP decision.
Bring us a position from your portfolio. We will show you the GP-side decision layer that lives above the OpCo planning stack.