Álvaro Larrañaga SigwaldÁlvaro Larrañaga Sigwald 
December 9th, 2020 Early Adopters
Workday is currently developing an Accounting Center; however, it is currently of limited availability, having early adopters making use of this new feature. Companies such as CNA, Shelter Insurance, AON, KeyBank and Fannie Mae are amongst the early adopters for WD Accounting Center.
Nonetheless, general availability is planned for the release 2021-R1 as of March 2021.
Overall process
WD Accounting Center will permit users to upload data to WD from different data sets, through EIB, SFTP, browser upload etc., enrich the data with worktags, perform the necessary transformations and then drive the accounting for the data. Much more data than the data posted in the journals will be uploaded to Workday; however, it will be available upon reporting.
Stages
The functioning of the WD Accounting Center is based on stages. These stages have as data input the output of the prior stage, meaning they all work on different versions of the same information – which is subsequently more and more complete information wise.
Enrichment Stage
This is the stage where worktags, custom list instances and validations are added to the data imported. One can add validations between the various enrichment stages to make sure the necessary information is populated.
Accounting Source Stage
After data enrichment, mapping tables are used before driving the accounting. Each mapping table has a maximum of twenty inputs, these fields will be coming out from the data set. It goes without saying that mapping is enabled for Web Service.
As with the Account Posting Rules, we will use mapping rules playing an important role on this stage; having the most granular at the top and the most general rules at the bottom, we will make sure the right accounting is driven.
After the mapping, data regarding the journal header, the lines for the header and summarization rules will be required, most of the fields can be selected from the data source (straight from the data being uploaded) or from a list (workday values).
Outcome
When configuring the Accounting Source stage, we will find a section called “Additional Attributes”. These attributes are the data that is being imported but will not be available on the general ledger. After the import and posting, WD Accounting Center will provide users with detailed information in the data set, and a summarized accounting that is posted to the ledger, with those datasets being linked, so that we can report on them at the same time.
Therefore, we will be able to report to the most granular level of detail whilst keeping the GL thin.
The main benefit of using the WD accounting center is leveraging system automation as well as machine learning so that the workforce can focus on analyzing data and decision-making.
Requirements
As Prism reporting is involved in the development of the WD Accounting Center, for a successful deployment of the WD Accounting Center at least both a Functional Consultant and an Integrations consultant are required.
The integrations consultant will deal with Prism whilst the FDM savvy functional consultant is supposed to ensure data is properly mapped so that customer reporting needs can be met.
