Workday® 2021R1 just hit Production tenants. To help you get familiar with this impressive list of new Financials features, here is a rundown of five that we find most impactful.

Simplifying Settlement

Settlement is the culmination of many carefully designed processes in your tenant. Workday has been working to increasing the effectiveness of this crucial set of operations – both to simplify processing and reduce payment costs!

1. Invoice Netting

You can now net together transactions for any business entity that is both a supplier for and a customer of your company, simplifying settlement and reducing bank fees associated payment processing in the process. This new feature was a long time coming, addressing a longstanding brainstorm. There is some minor setup required for uptake, namely creation of security policies for the new domains and configuration of Netting Rules, which effectively map customer records to corresponding supplier records, by company, and predefine invoice eligibility.

The new functionality is employed using a new transaction, called a Netting Transaction, which is intended to be run prior to the Settlement Run process. These can be initiated manually or scheduled, and any invoices included in the Netting Transaction will be marked as paid or partially paid, as appropriate. There are a few limitations to be aware of here, including only one option for default netting priority – Workday will attempt to net the oldest invoices first – and the inability to net transactions across companies.

2. Consolidating Intercompany Supplier Payments

Do you have the need to pay a single supplier on behalf of multiple companies in your tenant and wish you were able to consolidate those outbound payments? Workday has added the capability to do just that with 2020R1, addressing another highly supported brainstorm. This feature offers some key benefits – reducing the number of outbound payments and associated bank processing fees and allowing for the netting of credit memos across companies. Uptake here is simple - Workday provides a new Tenant Setup option to enable intercompany supplier payment consolidation at the tenant level.

Making Reporting More Flexible

Workday has managed to do away with many of the Xpresso reports over the years, but several foundational Xpresso reports remain without great custom alternatives. 2021R1 brings with it some updates that aim to narrow this gap.

3. Custom Reporting for Receivables Aging

Workday now provides a new Report Data Source Filter for receivables aging, enabling easier creation of custom receivables aging reports. Previously, custom reports for this purpose had to be painfully built from scratch and could not offer the same capabilities as those found in the standard Receivables Aging Detail Xpresso report. We are happy to report that the new RDS Filter provides users a similar ability to choose from financial aging or operational aging modes at the prompt screen and has the added benefit of allowing users to specify the accounting date when running in the financial aging mode. Setup is relatively straightforward and can be aided by the What’s New Post on the subject. The new RDS Filter does not yet support customer payments, though Workday plans to address this in a future enhancement.

Increasing Operational Efficiencies

A perpetual release theme, Workday is constantly striving to increase operational efficiencies, to make transacting in Workday easier and ever more seamless. Let’s take a look at a few features from 2021R1 that do just that.

4. Specifying Company for Allocation Offset Journals

If you have a complex consolidation structure, you likely have a set of intercompany allocation definitions configured for month end close processing. Unfortunately, intercompany allocation solutions can get complex very quickly, due in part to limitations inherent in the allocation definition setup. Workday is working to address this. With 2021R1, you can now specify the company for the resulting offset journals. This simple change can help reduce the number of multi-step allocations being processed, making maintenance easier and results more straightforward. This can also lead to a drastic reduction in the number of intercompany journal lines being generated, greatly improving performance and processing speed!

5. Receipt Scanning for Expenses as an Innovation Service

With 2021R1, Workday is delivering a new Receipt Scanning for Expenses service as an Innovation Service to significantly improve the expense receipt scanning experience. The new feature is powered by Google and enables users to simply snap a picture of their receipt and let Workday fill in several of the quick expense details for them, including date, amount, currency, and merchant fields. Most impressive of all, Google can even derive certain data points that are not explicitly listed on the receipt! Additionally, receipt scanning is now supported in English, French, Spanish, German, and Hindi. This new feature will not only make completing expense reports easier than ever but should also serve to improve data accuracy. (Note: to use Innovation Services, you must first contact your Customer Success Manager to obtain and sign the Innovation Services Agreement.)

These are only a handful of the new features that Workday has in store as part of the 2021R1 release. We highly recommend exploring these and others in more detail on Workday Community, testing the new features in your Sandbox Preview tenant, and updating your adoption plan accordingly. If you are interested in a customized 2021R1 Release review, please contact us and we will be happy to walk you through the new features with your specific business needs in mind.

Top 5 Workday® Financials Features for 2021R1