Finance plays a critical part in the success of any company. But with importance comes increased pressure—the finance team has to enable stakeholders across the business when it comes to making better decisions that inform strategy and impact the bottom line. Adding to the inherent challenges of delivering these insights is the fact that financial management solutions tend to consist of disparate systems that don’t talk to each other well, limiting an executive team’s ability to plan for the future.
The solution? An effective, user-friendly financial management solution that takes advantage of the latest technology used to gather transactions, reporting, and analytics in one place so that your finance team can plan, transact, and analyze data without leaving the system.
In other words, Workday Financial Management is your solution.
This article contains everything you need to know about Workday Financial Management (FM), from features to benefits, updates, and more. Let’s get started.
Overview of Workday Financial Management
Workday FM provides organizations with modern financial management capabilities in an adaptive cloud-based solution. The system supports transaction processing, multidimensional reporting, consolidation, planning, and compliance, and even better, it can be used from your desktop or mobile device.
Of course, the solution does more than manage financial processes — it improves financial consolidation, reduces time to close, gives consistency across global operation, and maximizes your Workday investment – all in a single system.
Key Features of Workday Financial Management
Here’s a breakdown of some key features of the Workday Financial Management modules:
- Accounting and Finance: Workday’s comprehensive solution supports all your organization’s accounting and finance functions. You’ll have the ability to access the financial impact of business events, analyze data across the enterprise, and share results securely.
- Revenue Management: From contract to cash, the system manages the entire revenue lifecycle. It also supports complex revenue arrangements while complying with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS) guidelines.
- Financial Reporting and Consolidation: Workday captures business data at the point of transaction and maintains valuable information through management and financial reporting—with results in real-time. It also simplifies consolidation and makes the close process easy to manage with better transparency.
- Financial Planning: Flexible tools give you financial and operational modeling (without the need for old-school spreadsheets). Instead, you’ll have tailored reports and dashboards, interactive visualizations, and reliable data.
- Projects: Project management software connects financials, human capital management (HCM), expenses, and time tracking, making it easier to staff, plan, track and manage internal and billable projects.
- Expenses: Workday Financial Management gives staff the flexibility to submit and approve expenses easily while you set controls and analyze spending.
- Grants Management: Workday takes some of the complexity out of grants by helping you meet grantor and organizational requirements for budgeting, accounting, billing, reporting, and compliance.
- Audit and Internal Controls: Something unique about Workday is its “always-on” audit and internal controls. This helps you identify risks and keep your organization secure 24/7.
Key Differentiators of Workday Financial Management
Workday’s solution provides many benefits when it comes to financial management and painting the full financial picture for an organization.
Here are some of the aspects that we think set it apart from the rest:
Adapts to Your Organization’s Needs
A flexible foundation allows you to adapt processes and quickly change as needed. Now your company can act faster as things change, helping you stay ahead of the curve.
Intelligent Automation
With machine learning continuously detecting inconsistencies and making recommendations, your finance operations become intelligent. Now, you can operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Enhanced Auditing
Workday documents every transaction and financial change to make it easier for your organization to manage risk and compliance.
Data and Accounting Together
Simplify accounting by automatically ingesting business event data into accounting, including the integration of general ledger data with other relevant information found within your Workday system.
Insights to Drive the Business
Workday surfaces data and insights when you need it, so leadership teams can see what’s impacting the business (and when). With more information and better insights, managers and company executives have the tools necessary to make better decisions.
Integration Capabilities with Workday FM Connector
Workday’s Revenue Management function changes the way you view your financial picture and manage your entire revenue life cycle. Its ability to integrate with any customer relationship management (CRM) system allows users to gain an in-depth view of their customers – including contract management, revenue recognition, customer collections, and billing schedules.
And, if your company uses Salesforce CRM to manage customer data and valuable opportunity information, you’re in luck. The Workday Financial Management Connector tool easily integrates with important opportunity management data in Salesforce, making your quote-to-cash processes more efficient and more accurate.
Here are some of the key capabilities of the Connector:
- Seamless integration of Workday FM and Salesforce CRM and Sales Cloud
- Automatic Salesforce activity updates when payments, adjustments, or invoices are made in Workday
- Decrease time and money required to implement a customer system integration
- Eliminate tedious, error-prone tasks (and increase efficiency of opportunity-to-cash process)
- Configure custom object mapping from Salesforce to objects in Workday
- Gain valuable insights into profitability and cost with increased ability to track time, revenue, and costs of opportunities
Across the Board Improvements from Workday 33 Update
Workday is continually releasing new system upgrades to maximize operations. Here’s a look into one of the newest Workday FM updates:
Greater Conversion Rate Precision
Currency conversion rates have been increased from 6 decimal places to 12, helping to reduce the need for manual corrections (and improving the accuracy of your GL overall). This feature increases currency conversion rates, reduces the need for manual corrections and is especially helpful to financial institutions and orgs that deal with conversion between very high- and low-value currencies.
Expanded Payment Formats
Who doesn’t love making it easier for clients to pay you? Workday Update 33 now allows for a wider variety of travel card functionality, including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, as well as more accurate reporting.
Period Close Improvements
Compliance and reporting have been improved; account reconciliation templates save you time when completing tasks; standard reports help to reduce errors during account certification; and “amount” is now available to use as an identifying dimension in transaction matching.
Enhanced Tax Reporting
Workday Update 33 boosts the software’s transaction tax defaulting capabilities by taking into account worktags like Location, Region, and Organization, not to mention Custom Worktags.
Getting Started with Workday Financial Management
If you’re ready to get a more accurate picture of your business and equip your staff with data and insights to move forward, Workday FM is the right solution for you. And when it comes time to implement or optimize your Workday Finance system (or any other Workday solution) and operations, our senior-level Workday consulting team is here for you.
In addition to their considerable knowledge of the software, they also bring years of hands-on experience from other implementations, providing you with out-of-the-box solutions and an expert outside perspective. So if you’re in need of someone to help you configure Workday and advise you on best practices and guidelines, look no further.
Even better, we’ve included a sample profile of one of our Workday Financial Management consultants to give you an idea of what to expect when partnering with us.
Surety Senior Workday Financial Management Consultant
- 7+ years of Workday Financials experience
- Expertise with Financials reporting including composite, advanced, and dashboards
- Certified in Prism, Workday Financials, and Composite Reporting
- Extensive experience in the higher education industry
- Acted as the Reporting/Prism Lead on most recent project
Interested in learning more about how our consultants have helped clients just like you? Click here to gain some insight into their skills and experience through an in-depth Q&A with one of our Workday Financials consultants.
Contact us today to get in touch and get started implementing or integrating your Workday financial system.
