With every Workday update, we ask ourselves the same question: How can we meet the requirements of large enterprise customers in a way that’s simpler, faster, and smarter? Below I highlight several new features in Workday 22, announced today, that demonstrate how we’re delivering on that promise. It’s just a sample of all the new functionality we’ve added to Workday Financial Management in this update—including more than 25 major new features—and as always, our customers have the flexibility to “turn on” any feature at their convenience.
Simpler: Customer Composite View
A simpler user experience means fewer keystrokes, clicks, and screen touches, from basic data entry to advanced report modification.
One example of this in Workday 22 is the new customer composite view in revenue management. This centralizes everything users need to know about a customer account in one place, including contracts, invoices, payments, and custom reports. With appropriate security, users can take action directly from the customer composite view on any of those areas. For example, if you want to view all invoices for a customer across your legal entities throughout the world, you can do that in one click rather than multiple clicks.
The custom reports tab in the composite view makes it possible to attach reports and analytics related to that customer. It might be a report on aging balances owed in foreign currencies, or it could be analysis of sentiment levels per customer reported using Workday Big Data Analytics to evaluate future revenue risk based on each customer’s satisfaction and the annual revenue it contributes. I think Workday customers will really value this improved user experience—what can be more important to revenue management than having a holistic view of your customers and all related documents and actions?
Faster: Multi-Company Within Legal Entity
To help our customers quickly take action on changes or issues involving organizations, processes, regulations, and financial performance that impact individual global divisions or companies within their enterprises, we offer a new feature we refer to as multi-company within legal entity. This makes it simpler to manage entities as if they are independent companies with their own financial statements. Our higher education customers also will benefit from this new feature, by making it easier for them to manage separate entities for each major academic discipline.
Also in the area of multi-company management, we now support intercompany procurement cards for procuring goods and services as part of shared services. Many customers prefer this approach for better cash management and internal controls. We’ve also added mass procurement close/roll forward for requisitions, purchases orders, and supplier contracts to expedite updates on multiple documents. This is helpful for enterprises that want to quickly close out accounts inactive for a period of years rather than closing them one at a time, which can get cumbersome if there are a lot of documents and even more so if commitment accounting is required.
Smarter: More Analytics for Better Decisions
We constantly strive to provide smarter analytics in every update. In Workday 22, managers can create and run financial reports for specific organizations directly from journal lines with user-friendly filters. In addition, we extended our report bursting capability to all types of categories, including regions, cost centers, and projects. We also offer a feature to enable ledger accounts for custom objects, so users can define account attributes to be used for reporting or for validation rules.
This set of reporting enhancements is another step towards some major reporting enhancements planned for Workday 23, but I’ll keep those details for another blog!
Also in the area of smarter analytics are two more features I’m excited about: First, our new procurement dashboard, available on the laptop and mobile devices. This provides a simple and convenient way to analyze spend right at your fingertips. Take a look:
Second, we’ve made multiple enhancements to our allocations engine, including book code, rate type, mass finalization, and automatic reversals. Knowing that allocations can run in “pro-forma,” financial experts are really going to value what we believe to be the most powerful and elegantly designed allocation engine on the market!
The features mentioned above are just a teaser of our updates for finance with Workday 22, thanks to feedback from customers in Workday Community and the hard work of many teams. I know our large enterprise customers, in particular, will really appreciate these new capabilities delivered in a simple, fast, and smart user experience.
