As we transition into the holiday season, where the temperatures are dropping and leaves are falling, we are also in the playoff push for our football teams! At this point in the season, and even in the recent family “Turkey Bowls”, teams have seen what works and what doesn’t; maybe similar to the feeling you have about your Workday environment, where ideas that sounded great during implementation (pre-season) are not panning out.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts documents into editable and reportable data. In the Workday world, this technology can be leveraged to transform invoice and receipt images directly into Workday Supplier invoices and Expense Reports, respectively. This technology has expanded in Workday over the last few years, whether that be evolving from having to manually upload images to automatic email ingestion capabilities, expanding to ingest a number of different languages, or supporting a true touchless AP process. This blog provides insights into the AP functions of OCR, from the lense of your team's Offense, Defense, Special Teams and Coaches, sharing recommendations and lessons learned from past and current implementations to best prepare your team for Game-Day.
Invoice Assignment Rules/Work Queue Tags - “Getting the play call.”
Our players need to know their assignments on each play. Invoice Assignment Rules automate the play call for your AP team, giving direction to team members on where they should be focusing their time.
Spend Category Recommendations/Defaulting - “No wasted motion.”
Understanding Spend Category is a required field for all invoices and is not a field OCR will map, evaluating if there’re opportunities for Spend Category Defaulting from the supplier record OR leveraging Workday’s machine learning worktag recommendations to make spend category selection seamless. Workday’s machine learning recommendations are not unique to Spend category, and can provide insights into other Workday delivered worktags, such as Cost Center or Location.
Email Ingestion - “The ball moves faster than you."
Invoices can make their way into Workday several ways: Manual creation, via EIB/Integration, Upload and Scan, Or Email Ingestion. We recommend setting up automatic redirects from local AP emails into Workday which can increase processing time, allow for full invoice management in Workday, and give organizations accurate reporting metrics into invoice life cycles.
OCR Security - “Know your gap assignments.”
You can’t have a good defense if you can’t stop the run, and the first key to stopping the run is a defense aligned on their gap assignments. OCR security can be looked at very similarly, ensuring every gap is accounted for and no invoices are left unassigned. The first key is ensuring we have AP security assigned at each company we expect invoices for, knowing that edit access to invoices is typically constrained on a company level. Additionally, we recommend preparing for when OCR is not able to correctly identify the company on the invoice. A great “counter” we have seen work previously is the creation of a User-Based “OCR administrator” security group that would have unconstrained access to properly reassign unassigned invoices to the correct individuals.
OCR Tenant Settings - “A good defense can adapt to the offensive scheme.”
Depending on the complexity of your organization, we recommend evaluating the tenant options for greater OCR Success. In previous, we have seen customers enable defaulting the OCR company, making security much easier to control. Additionally, we have seen customers opt to default every OCR invoice to just 1 invoice line, as teams were spending more time removing lines created from OCR than time spent coding the invoice.
Scanned Highlights - “Eye discipline.”
A trait of successful defenses, especially in the passing game, is having strong eye discipline to anticipate plays and react accordingly. Scanned highlights are a tool to improve your AP team’s eye discipline. In reviewing invoices from OCR, Scanned highlights can cut out time spent going back and forth between invoice attachment and the Workday Invoice Screen trying to locate specific details from the invoice.
PO Line Linking - “Prioritize effort.”
Coaches must instill a mentality that special teams are a priority and that every player makes a choice to be tough and give maximum effort. The same can be said with linking purchase order lines to OCR invoices. With the use of Workday Procurement, linking Supplier Invoice Lines to Purchase Order Lines can increase efficiency in the procure to pay process. A key benefit in mapping invoice lines back to purchase order lines is that the Workday invoice will retain all worktag/line information from the purchase order, limiting errors and time spent in invoice coding. As of 2025R1, WD can automate the link of Purchase Orders to Invoices. We have seen better success when Invoices display the Workday Purchase Order Number, however this can also be done from reading line level information (Item, Unit Cost, Quantity, Extended Amount). Additionally, we have seen greater success with this working with Goods PO’s versus Services PO’s, where this line information might not exist. Always know manually linking invoices back to purchase orders is achievable through the Supplier Invoice Work Area, with the caveat that Workday will default the invoice amount to the remaining PO amount, which is behavior the team should be coached on.
Touchless Supplier Invoice - “One play mentality.”
Special team’s plays happen independently. A focus on making a game-changing play on any given snap and treating each play as if it could swing momentum is vital. Taking the previous item a step further, as of 2025R1 Workday now has the capability for a true touchless AP process, automatically submitting purchase order invoices upon creation. Touchless supplier invoices is Workday’s One Play Mentality. For your organization, if there’re suppliers you see high success in Workday OCR linking PO Lines to Invoices, ask yourself does it make sense to automatically have these submitted? With a recommended review step for the touchless invoices, this is another opportunity to improve procure to pay efficiency and give AP team members time back in their days to focus elsewhere. A configuration benefit of this process is that this can be enabled on a supplier by supplier basis, giving the team flexibility in how they would like to roll this out.
Supplier Invoice Work Area - “Consider game day factors.”
Similar to how coaches must adjust gameplans for environmental factors like wind, rain, or snow, AP Managers might need to work with their team to adjust their gameplan for what they know works once live on Workday. Customizing the supplier invoice work area based on your organizational needs can be key to OCR success. Although minor, ensuring your AP team is aware of column preferences within their work queue to bring key data points to the forefront and hiding data points that are not relevant can greatly improve the user experience. Additionally, coaching your team on understanding their capabilities with Work Area Prompts, knowing the work area will default to invoices assigned to them, but does not prevent them from searching for others’ invoices. This can become extremely valuable in mitigating processing delays when team members are out of office. Finally, we have seen success enhancing the Supplier Accounts Hub with custom reports, giving AP team’s better insight into the invoice status after the item is cleared from their work queue.
Ingestion Failures - “Utilizing the challenge flag.”
Just like coaches must decide to challenge the previous call, your AP team might face some decisions for invoices that have failed Workday’s Ingestion. This can happen for a couple of different reasons, but it’s important to have a dedicated resource to monitor ingestion activity as well as understand reasons invoices might not process successfully. A couple key callouts:
File format – Workday only supports certain file formats, invoices will fail if the format is not supported. Examples of unsupported formats are .xlsx or .doc
Number of Pages – Workday only supports invoices with a maximum of 15 pages. This can be problematic with certain vendors.
Approved Senders – If you are not using an automatic redirect, the list of allowed senders will need to be maintained and invoices will fail if the email address of the sender is not added prior to emailing invoices to Workday
Implementing or optimizing OCR doesn’t have to feel like a fourth-quarter scramble. If you need support improving AP efficiency, refining OCR configuration or tackling any of your broader Workday support needs, Invisors is ready to partner with you. Connect with us today to design a Workday playbook that moves your organization towards the endzone. Use the form here to get in touch with our Workday "coaches" →