Planning Agent

Planning Agent assists with running complex, multi-step finance processes, such as budgeting, planning, and reforecasting. You interact with the Planning Agent through a natural-language chat interface.

Finance teams can hand off repetitive, multi-step work to the Planning Agent while still keeping full control: you can approve, audit, and verify each action it takes. The result is a balance between automation and oversight—the agent handles the repetitive steps, while your team decides when it acts and how much autonomy it has.

  • Users access the Planning Agent through the Prophix Copilot chat interface within FP&A Plus.

  • Administrators configure and manage skills in Administration > Skills Manager.

Key concepts: Skills and Steps

Two terms you will see throughout this article:

  • Skill: A set of FP&A Plus actions chained together to complete a task. For example, a skill might set up a model version, update member properties, publish a model, set named sets or filter values, run a process, open a data entry view, or update data.

  • Step: A single action inside a skill. A skill is really just a sequence of steps, run in order.

Prophix provides ready-made skills for common processes, such as budgeting and reforecasting. Customers can also:

  • Build their own skills

  • Modify existing skills

  • Add or remove steps

  • Define dependencies between steps

  • Share skills across their organization

Capabilities and uses for Planning Agent

In its initial release, the Planning Agent can manage:

  • Budgeting processes

  • Reforecasting processes

  • Planning processes

These capabilities apply to financial models and related models, such as personnel and currency models.

The Planning Agent carries out each of these processes by running a skill. Every skill is made up of steps, and each step belongs to a defined step type. The following section lists the step types available at launch.

Available Step types

Skills are built from a defined set of step types. The table lists what is available at launch.

Step type What is does

Update Single Filter

Updates a filter by replacing its members with a new, explicit selection.

Update Time Reference Filter

Updates a time filter by replacing its members with a new, explicit selection.

Update Time Range Filter

Updates a time filter that uses a range condition, selecting all periods between a start and end index.

Update Standard Filter

Updates a standard filter by replacing its members with a new, explicit selection.

Review Filters

Pauses the workflow so a user can manually review the selected filters, then approve or reject before continuing.

Update Version

Selects a planning version and sets its date range and carryforward method.

Add New Version

Adds a new version member to a cube's version dimension, with an optional name, version type, rule set, and date range.

Publish Model

Publishes a cube or model after definition changes.

Update Ad-Hoc Layout

Updates the layout of an ad-hoc data entry file for the current planning cycle.

Review Files

Pauses the workflow so a user can manually review the selected files, then approve or reject before continuing.

Run Process

Runs a process by file ID and waits for it to finish.

Refresh Model

Runs an on-the-fly update process to refresh a model's data.

Validate Templates

Verifies that data entry templates reflect the correct planning version filter and time dimension columns.

Validate Workflows

Verifies that budget workflows have correct start and end dates, are linked to the right budget owners, and reference the correct templates.

Update Model Data

Saves data values to a model's cube store.

Additional supporting functionality: notifications, scheduling, data security, user-level permissions, and human-in-the-loop checks.

Recurring and Scheduled Runs

If you want to run the same process again the following period, the Planning Agent supports scheduling. Scheduled skills can start automatically and adjust for period changes on each run. Automatic starts can also be set to wait for user approval before running.

Use cases

Examples of Planning Agent use cases include:

  • Standard budgeting cycles: Automate the setup, data entry, and validation steps of a recurring budget process.

  • Reforecasting: Reuse and adjust an existing skill to reforecast financials as business conditions change.

  • Personnel and currency planning: Apply the same automation approach to related models, not just the core financial model.

  • Custom business processes: Modify or build skills for processes that do not match an out-of-the-box skill, and share them across the organization.

  • Recurring, scheduled runs: Set a skill to automatically start each period, with or without a required approval step.

Prompting

You can tell Planning Agent exactly what you want to it to do. For example:

  • Run the budget reforecast skill.

  • Start the update filter skill

Restrictions

  • Permission-gated access: Only users with the Planning Agent function turned on (under Administrative Functions, in the Groups, Roles, Functions, and Access settings) can use the Planning Agent or Skills Manager.

  • FP&A Plus only, for now: The Planning Agent is built specifically for the FP&A Plus product. Other Prophix products are not supported at this time.