3 Questions to Answer Before Deploying Workday Accounting Center

Many organizations begin evaluating Workday Accounting Center because they're trying to solve a financial data challenge that traditional journal integrations don't fully address.

Sometimes the challenge is manual accounting processes. Other times it's limited visibility into the transactions behind General Ledger activity. Often, it's a combination of both.

The most successful Workday Accounting Center deployments don't start with accounting rules or integration designs. They start by understanding what the business needs from its financial data and how that data should support reporting, reconciliation and decision-making.

Before deploying Workday Accounting Center, here are three questions worth answering.

# 1 |   Is your data architecture ready for Accounting Center?

Every Accounting Center process starts with data. 

That data might come from a point-of-sale system, billing platform, banking application or another operational system. Before thinking about accounting rules, organizations first need to understand what they're working with:

• Is the data consistent?

• Does it come from one system or several?

• How frequently does it need to move into Workday?

• And how much data are you processing?

These questions become especially important for organizations managing high transaction volumes or bringing together information from multiple systems.

For example, one source system might deliver information in a completely different format from another. Before Accounting Center can consistently process that activity, those inputs may need to be standardized.

Volume matters too. A process handling thousands of transactions each month has different considerations than one handling millions.

The goal isn't for finance leaders to design the technical architecture themselves. It's to make sure the team understands the sources, scale and history required before designing the solution around them.

The question to answer: Can we consistently get the data Accounting Center needs, at the volume and frequency our business requires?

# 2 |      What needs to happen to the data before it generates accounting?

Getting data into Workday is only the beginning. The next question is how that data needs to be translated into meaningful accounting. 

Imagine a business processing thousands of point-of-sale transactions every day. Finance doesn't necessarily need every individual sale represented as a separate line in the General Ledger. It needs those transactions translated into the right accounting while preserving access to the underlying details when questions arise. 

That's where transformation becomes important.

Depending on the use case, source data may need to be organized, categorized, calculated or summarized before it becomes a journal entry.

Before deploying Accounting Center, organizations should understand things like: The answer depends on where your organization is in its Workday journey. 

• What accounting outcome should the source transactions produce?

• Are there calculations or business rules that need to happen first?
• Does data from different sources need to be handled differently?
• How much detail belongs in the final General Ledger entry?

These decisions shouldn't be viewed as purely technical requirements. They're an opportunity to think about whether the current accounting process is actually working the way the business needs it to.

Rather than simply recreating an existing manual process in Accounting Center, organizations can use the deployment as an opportunity to simplify how data moves from business activity to accounting.

The question to answer: What transformation needs to happen between the original transaction and the final accounting entry? 

# 3 |    What do you need to see behind the numbers?

For many finance teams, getting a journal entry into Workday isn't the biggest challenge. It's understanding what sits behind it. 

Traditional journal integrations can get summarized accounting into the General Ledger, but much of the supporting transaction detail may remain in the source system. 

That can leave finance teams moving between systems when they need to investigate a variance, reconcile an account or answer a question about a particular transaction. 

Accounting Center provides a different approach. 

Organizations can keep their General Ledger focused on the information needed for financial reporting while maintaining access to the detailed operational information behind those entries. 

For example, a summarized journal might contain the information finance needs for the GL, while supporting detail could include things like:

• Policy or claim numbers

• Order numbers

• SKUs

• Customer information

• Other transaction-level details 

Accounting Center maintains the connection between the summarized accounting and that underlying detail, giving finance teams greater visibility without requiring every piece of operational information to live in the General Ledger.

Before deployment, think about the questions your finance team regularly needs to answer:

• What information do they leave Workday to find today?

• What details would make reconciliation easier?

• What historical information needs to remain available?

• Which information belongs in the GL + and which simply needs to be accessible when someone needs to dig deeper? 
  

Those answers can help shape a reporting experience that's useful long after implementation is complete. 

The question to answer: When someone asks, "What's behind this number?" What information does your finance team need to answer confidently? 

Think beyond the journal entry

It's easy to approach Accounting Center as another way to get accounting entries into Workday. But that's only part of its value. The bigger opportunity is to think about the entire journey of your financial data: 

Can you get the right data in? → Can you generate the right accounting? → Can your teams understand what's behind it? 

Answering those questions before deployment helps organizations make better decisions about how Accounting Center should be designed and where it can deliver the most value. It can also help avoid a common mistake: using new technology to recreate an old process without first asking whether there's a better way to do it. 

The goal shouldn't simply be to automate journal creation. It should be to create a financial data process that's easier to manage, easier to understand and better equipped to support the business as it grows.

While Accounting Center can support a wide range of use cases, there are a few areas where we consistently see strong value.

Considering Workday Accounting Center?

Whether you're evaluating Accounting Center for the first time or preparing for a deployment, Invisors can help you identify the right use cases, understand your data and reporting requirements and design an approach that works for your finance team. Use the form to contact us + start the conversation.