A Busy Year for Workday Financial Management

It has been a little more than a year since I joined Workday, and I want to share some thoughts as we start the new year with our rollout of Workday 21.

Over 2013, Workday delivered three updates that provided significant financial management features and capabilities in the areas of reporting, business assets, projects, grants, revenue, and spend. In comparison, such scope may have taken several years and upgrades to occur in traditional onsite finance applications. I credit our unique Workday technology, and our development teams for keeping our customers’ needs and feedback as the No. 1 priority in our development approach. And a year after joining, I’m still amazed that all of our Workday Financial Management customers—without exception—are on the latest Workday update and taking advantage of the most recent enhancements, yet doing it at their own pace through our configuration options. I see this as true freedom from the inflexible product-release model for traditional business software.

The increased functionality we’ve delivered oftentimes has surpassed on-premise finance software. In the area of business assets alone, new capabilities that surpass on-premise functionality include pooled assets (Workday 21), composite assets (Workday 21), capital assets (Workday 20), and rights management on intangible assets (Workday 19).

Many of these new features are focused on removing complexity from financial management. In Workday 21, for example, it’s now easier to manage the appreciation and depreciation of assets, by providing a way to automatically group similar ones into one pooled expense, with those pooled assets making up a composite asset. For example, if a company is opening a new training room containing 25 chairs and 25 desks, that furniture can be pooled into one depreciable capital asset as part of the composite asset, the training room.

Workday Financial Management customers we’ve announced in the past year include Allied Global Holdings, Schumacher Group, ServiceSource, Shelter Insurance Companies, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and WGBH. We had a number of customers that finished their deployments representing a variety of industries and organization sizes. Many are already benefitting from having built-in analytics for finance management and planning, which can eliminate the need for standalone business intelligence software for that purpose and offers a truly combined solution for both accounting and analytics.

When I look ahead to 2014 and beyond, I am very excited with our roadmap and even more with the list of customers planning to deploy. As in past years, we plan to deliver another wave of major features, bringing innovation and tangible value to all of our customers without delay. We will continue focusing on customer success, which remains the top criteria to assess the overall performance of Workday Financial Management.