Top 5 New Workday® Financials Features for 2022R1
Twice a year, Workday® releases major sets of feature updates designed to expand functionality and enhance user experience. This year’s first release - Workday 2022R1 - is already available for your perusal in preview tenants and will hit production tenants on March 12th. To help you prepare for the upcoming release, we’ve compiled a list of 5 of the most impactful new Workday Financials features coming soon to your tenant.
1. OfficeConnect Availability for Financial Management
First up, we’re happy to announce that Workday has expanded the availability of OfficeConnect to Workday Financials. OfficeConnect is a feature that’s been available to Workday Adaptive Planning clients for several years and will now enable your accounting and FP&A users to build reports in Excel with live journal line data - welcomed news for many who prefer doing data analysis and manipulation in Excel. Once the initial setup and connection are complete, authorized users can easily build reports in Excel by dragging and dropping from a menu of dimensions (and their respective hierarchies) pulled straight from your Workday tenant! Besides supporting easy refreshing of data, the Excel add-in also leverages Workday’s security model and translation and elimination rule sets. All of this adds up to less reliance on Workday administrators and more power at your finance users’ fingertips.
2. Automated Project Asset Assignment
Looking to add increased automation to your labor and cost capitalization process? You’re in luck! Project managers can now automatically assign capital project transactions to project assets for the projects they own. This is accomplished by an enhanced project asset setup, allowing project managers to leverage condition rules to determine which transactions should be automatically added to a given project asset. A new job, called Project Asset Auto-Assignment, kicks off the auto-assignment process and can be scheduled or run manually as needed. This new feature will help to eliminate much of the tedious effort in doing these assignments manually and could significantly increase the efficiency of the process as a whole.
3. Customer Invoice Proposals
With 2022R1, Workday has added to the range of actions you can take on customer invoice proposals - the functionality initially released last fall that enabled Revenue Management customers to stage billing data for review before actually generating a customer invoice. This has been especially useful for PSA customers with complex project time billing needs. The latest update enables users to create progress bills by allowing for the addition of prepaid installments on invoice proposals. The update also supports the inclusion of those prepaid installments on the same proposal as other billing transaction lines, facilitating a single consolidated invoice for your customers. This update should further enable your AR team to streamline the invoice review and adjustment process.
4. Route Supplier Invoices Through Management Chain
Addressing a long-standing and widespread need, this release will also enable customers to leverage the supervisory organization management chain for approval routing of supplier invoices. It is worth noting that the routing is based on the worker entered in the ‘Approver’ field of the invoice header, not on the initiator of the invoice itself. BP step conditions can also be created to control the specific levels of the management chain that are used during routing when using this functionality. The new feature should serve to simplify the supplier invoice approval process and eliminate the need to create custom roles to mimic the supervisory hierarchy for this purpose.
5. Grants Management Configurations for Award Line Types
Lastly, a small, but welcomed addition for those customers using Grants Management - Workday now allows you to set valid and default award line types, both at the tenant level and on a company-by-company basis. This feature should greatly reduce user error and should help streamline the award creation process. It will be particularly helpful for organizations with complex legal structures, such as large research institutions with attached hospitals.
How Can We Help?
Finding the time to prepare for each release can be tough, but don’t let that fact cause your organization to miss out on the latest features and improvements. Makse Group can help! Contact us today to hear more about our Workday Release Management and Testing Support services.
