Top 5 Workday® Financials Features for 2021R2

Top 5 Workday® Financials Features from 2021R2

Workday® 2021R2 will be in production tenants soon with many impactful new features for Financials clients. Here, we highlight 5 features that we think will be the most impactful for you and your organization.

Reporting Ease and Accuracy

Reports are critical in Workday for turning your transactional data into valuable and actionable insights. There’s no area where this is more true than in  bank reconciliation.

1.       New Book to Bank Report

Workday has created a new bank reconciliation report from the ground up to replace the often-problematic ‘Book to Bank Report’. The new report, called ‘Book to Bank Summary Report’, has been simplified with fewer required prompt fields and allows users to report on multiple bank accounts at once.

In addition to the improved ease of use, the new report fixes many of the shortfalls in how the reconciliation adjustment fields are calculated. For example, it better supports multi-period reconciliations by including all unreconciled bank statement lines in a single field rather than separating them by current and prior periods. A similar improvement was made for the non-operational journal line total, which now shows the sum of all non-operational journal lines for the current year and all prior years rather than the beginning balance plus non-operational activity for the current year. Additionally, the new report can accurately account for many-to-many reconciliation groups that cross over periods being reported on.

As a bonus, for those reconciliations that require more detailed analysis, drill through links have been enabled so that users can easily drill into any of the 10 sub-reports for further review.  

Data Management and Duplicate Prevention

Duplicate records and other data errors can cause confusion, leading to reporting inaccuracies and data cleanup headaches. Luckily, Workday has continued its effort to add features to help prevent these types of errors at the source.

2.       Detect and display duplicate suppliers

This feature expands the duplicate supplier detection functionality to include the following fields: Bank Account, Contact Information Email, Supplier Name, Supplier Alternate Name, Supplier Contact Phone, Supplier Contact Email. The use of these fields for duplicate supplier detection is optional and must be configured with the Edit Tenant Setup – Financials task. When a potential duplicate is identified using any of the enabled fields, a warning will be displayed to the user upon submission and also to the approvers on the Supplier Event business process.

Streamlined Transaction Processing

Eliminating the need for non-standard workarounds for transaction processing saves clients time and ensures transactions are recorded consistently and accurately each time. In this release, Workday has continued to address highly supported brainstorms in an effort to standardize its approach to shared use cases.  

3.       Supplier Refunds

Workday customers have been asking for a better way to record a supplier refund for a long time, and the feature is finally here! With this feature users can create a supplier refund directly from a supplier invoice adjustment, eliminating the need to apply the adjustment against a future invoice, among other workarounds previously used to clear a negative balance due to a supplier.

A big caveat here is that the supplier refund functionality does not allow you to record a receipt of cash directly against a supplier refund, so any deposits associated with a supplier refund will still need be recorded manually using an un-linked Ad Hoc Bank Transaction. It is recommended that you create an Ad Hoc Bank Transaction template and optionally a First Notice Rule to help automate the cash accounting for these AHBTs and to correctly offset to the same unapplied supplier refunds ledger account posted to by the supplier refund itself.

Simplified Error Correction

Small errors often require a large effort to correct. Workday is continuing to help minimize the time and effort required for clients to make low-impact corrections to operational transactions without compromising security and integrity. 

4.       Customer Invoice Proposals

The new Customer Invoice Proposal feature acts as a draft step for customer invoices, so that they may be reviewed and adjusted prior to final submission. The purpose of this feature is to prevent situations where customer invoices need to be cancelled and recreated to correct for small errors in the initial creation of the invoice.

5.       Change Purchase Orders without creating Change Orders

A new task is now available to allow users to make changes to low-impact fields on a purchase order without needing to route through the change order business process. This process greatly increases the efficiency of editing and maintaining existing purchase orders. The fields available for editing without creating a change order are:

·       Bill-To Contact

·       Buyer

·       Line Deliver-To

·       Due Date

·       Internal Memo

·       Memo

·       Payment Terms

·       Purchase Order Type

·       Shipping Instructions

·       Shipping Method

·       Shipping Terms

·       Header Ship-To Contact

·       Line Ship-To Contact

Some minor setup is required to enable this task, and its availability can be limited with the use of Procurement Condition Rules.