Why choose Workday Financial Management for your Enterprise?

ERP Cloud Training Online Author

Sep 03, 2024 |

Explore the features, benefits & implementation steps of Workday Financial Management, a leading cloud-based solution for modern financial operation

The landscape of enterprise financial management is progressing at a rapid pace in the present era. Thus, the selection of appropriate software for financial operations may turn out to be a game-changer for your business. In the passage of the past few years, Workday Financial Management has strongly evolved as a leading cloud-based financial management software solution for several progressive businesses.

These businesses are utilizing this software solution for the purpose of streamlining their complex financial processes, finding insights in real-time and eventually driving growth. In this blog, we tend to explore the major ins and outs of Workday Financial Management, highlighting all its features, benefits, steps of implementation, and success stories.

What do you mean by Workday Financial Management?

Workday Financial Management is a cloud-based and comprehensive software solution that is perfectly designed to manage all the financial operations of progressive business enterprises. It provides a unified system for the purposes of revenue management, financial accounting, procurement, expense management, and asset management. By leveraging the power of modern technology, this wonderful software named Workday Financial Management offers businesses a great way to improve their financial visibility, efficiency, and control.

There are a number of Workday Financial Management modules that are helpful for different purposes. The companies adopting Workday usually provide Workday Financial Management Training that makes the employees well-trained in using this dynamic cloud-based software optimally and extract the best value out of it.

The Importance of Modern Financial Management Solutions

The present times marks the most competitive business environment of all times. For every business to be at the forefront and remain relevant, they should necessarily possess a highly competitive financial management solution which is the need of the hour. Various traditional financial systems are not good enough anymore when it comes to their integration capabilities, desired flexibility, and capacity for real-time access to various crucial data.

A modern and technologically advanced financial management system is necessarily required to relevantly support a highly dynamic and versatile business environment. Thus, the traditional financial systems are increasingly replaced by several modern solutions like Workday Financial Management. This helps a long list of progressive business enterprises with the following benefits:

• Making informed decisions—It aids in making more informed and appropriate decisions by using real-time data and analytics.

• Enhance compliance – It reduces the risk with the help of robust control mechanisms.

• Scale operations – It efficiently supports the growth of a business.

• Integrates seamlessly – It helps seamlessly integrate a business organization with other enterprise systems to receive a unified view of a concerned business.

Key Characteristics of Workday Financial Management

The key characteristics of Workday Financial Management are:

1. Financial Accounting

The package of Workday Financial Management is highly instrumental in providing a wide suite of extremely useful tools for financial management. All of these offered tools are helpful in streamlining different processes, like as general ledger, accounts payable, cash management, & accounts receivable. By utilizing the power of real-time financial data, several progressive businesses can seamlessly ensure the right level of accuracy & thus the businesses can make timely financial decisions.

2. Management of Revenue

The highly evolved Revenue management feature of Workday Financial Management software is effective in managing the multiple revenue streams of progressive businesses. This particular software is highly suitable for processes of complex revenue recognition & maintaining the right compliance with the various leading accounting standards like IFRS and GAAP.

3. Management of Expenses

One of the important modules of Workday Financial Management is Expense Management. It simplifies the overall procedure of tracking as well as reporting employee expenses. This also strongly automates the different processes like reimbursement processes, reporting of the employees’ expenses, & workflows of approvals. Every component always ensures the complete compliance with different existing corporate policies of various businesses.

4. Asset Management

The asset management module of Workday very conveniently allows a number of progressive businesses to track and manage their physical and intangible assets. This module primarily includes asset acquisition, depreciation, and disposal processes. All of these help businesses maintain accurate asset records and optimize their asset utilization to the fullest.

5. Operations Related to Procurement

Workday Financial Management has a module of procurement that helps various progressive businesses skillfully manage all their business-related purchasing procedures. It is a very important module that relevantly includes certain tools for various purposes like supplier management, creation of purchase orders and matching of invoices. Every feature in this module of Workday Financial Management largely helps in streamlining the various procurement activities as well as considerably improves the relationships of the businesses with their suppliers.

Primary Benefits of Using Workday Financial Management

1. Better Level of Financial Control & Visibility

Workday Financial Management is instrumental in appropriately providing relevant financial data & insights and that too in real-time. This feature helps progressive business organizations gain an adequate and perfect view of their financial health. This helps the businesses in gaining the right level of visibility which facilitates them in making informed decisions and considerably improves their financial controls.

2. Access to All Financial Data in Real-time & Analytics

With the help of Workday Financial Management, businesses can get access to real-time data and derive advanced analytics from the same. This facilitates the businesses in monitoring their financial performance. It also helps businesses identify trends and also facilitates making decisions to drive adequate and optimum growth.

3. Scalability & Flexibility to Support the Growth of a Business

The modules of Workday Financial Management are very well curated in scaling your business. Whether you run a large corporation or a small business, this software is apt to cater to your requirements and provide adequate flexibility to grow your business optimally.

4. Right Level of Risk Management & Compliance

Workday Financial Management offers very strong compliance features and capacity for risk management. It facilitates businesses in adhering to the various regulatory requirements & managing financial risks very effectively. It reduces the likelihood of various potential compliance issues.

5. Integration with Other Workday Modules

One of the very significant benefits of Workday Financial Management is its integration capabilities. It has the right level of capacity to integrate seamlessly with different other modules of Workday, like HR and Payroll. Thus it provides a unified view of the entire business & helps in improving its efficiency manifold.

Steps to Be Followed for Integrating/Implementing Workday Financial Software

The implementation of Workday Financial Management usually involves numerous steps which consist of the below-mentioned steps:

1. Needs Assessment – Firstly, you should identify your business's requirements and determine how Workday can feasibly meet all those needs.

2. Planning – Then, you need to develop a detailed implementation plan that includes timelines, key milestones, and resource allocation.

3. Configuration – This step involves configuring the Workday system to match all your business requirements and processes.

4. Migrating Data – This step involves the successful transfer of the existing financial data to the installed Workday Financial Management system. This completely ensures data accuracy and integrity.

5. Thorough Testing – You need to test thoroughly in order to determine in case there are any potential issues. This is to be done before going live and in case of any issues found, it necessarily needs to be fixed before going live.

6. Training – Then, you should train your team on how to use the new system effectively.

7. Going Live – It is now time to launch the Workday Financial Management system & monitor its performance.

8. Continuous Improvement – You should evaluate and optimize the system to ensure that it meets your business's evolving requirements.

Case Studies & Success Stories

Many global enterprises as well as small businesses have been successfully using Workday Financial Management over the years. All of these business enterprises have successfully implemented Workday Financial Management & received significant benefits out of the same. Here are a few examples of the same.

1. Franklin Templeton

Franklin Templeton is a global company serving millions of clients & handles a large portfolio of investments. This company depends on Workday to manage its financial accounting systems. They manage a huge portfolio of $1.4 trillion assets. The company offers a wide variety of financial products to its clients around the globe. In order to unify its various financial systems, aligning the multiple systems with HR and managing data from integrating acquisitions, the company deploys Workday Financial Management for the following purposes:

• Easily review data & create reports as a part of the entire business flow.

• Leveraging the capabilities of machine learning and AI in Workday.

• Choosing when to invest in certain products that will drive faster and better operational performance.

Benefits reaped by Franklin Templeton by adopting Workday Financial Management are:

• Saved 125 hours of monthly effort by the company

• Better and faster decision-making

• Reduce the number of integration schedules from 1000+ to under 200.

Source:https://www.workday.com/en-gb/customer-stories/a-h/franklin-templeton-financial-system-based-on-data-trust.html

2. Philips

Philips is a globally renowned company that excels in the research and implementation of global health technology and pioneering the benefits from deeper insights into workforce & cost planning. The company is instrumental in harnessing the proven value as well as using the versatility of Workday to drive the newer and continuous processes of planning and gain certain strategic advantages in the field of financial planning. The company evolved as a global leader in the field of advanced health technologies and is working on the mission to achieve the health & well-being of 2.5 billion people by the year 2030. This company has already adopted to play a pivotal role in the digital revolution and transforming healthcare services.

The company faced certain geographic complexities as well as limitations regarding legacy Excel processes and certain data consolidation for the planning of an enterprise-wide workforce. All of these became challenges for the company. Greater consistency, insight, and accuracy were required to ensure more informed decision-making for the entire business. Since the year 2014, Workday has largely facilitated the transformation of Philips's finance and HR operations. The recent additional introduction of adaptive planning largely capitalizes on the versatility of Workday and is presently driving the company's large workforce and cost planning.

Benefits reaped by Philips by adopting Workday Financial Management are:

• Workday has brought Finance & HR closer together to reaping smarter outcomes.

• Workday has offered much greater operational efficiencies and agility.

• The implementation of Workday has been far more streamlined and has standardized the various planning cycles.

• Workday has played a significant role in aligning a company’s workforce. It helps in successfully achieving the set and desired roles of several business organizations.

Source: https://www.workday.com/en-gb/customer-stories/i-p/philips-cost-planning-global-health-technology-pioneer.html

Challenges Found with Workday Financial Management

Implementing Workday Financial Management software requires the right level of effort and the guidance of Workday experts.

Certain challenges can come across during the implementation of Workday Financial Management software. Some of these challenges are as follows:

1. Finding the Perfect Workday Implementation Partner

Even before starting the Workday implementation procedure, several business organizations come across a road bump while they are in the process of finding the correct Workday partner. There are several choices, and thus, a business organization should necessarily prioritize the needs of its business organization and look for the right fit for its team. While a business organization is hunting for a software implementation partner, they should necessarily look for the following traits:

• A highly robust reputation for conducting successful implementations for renowned companies of different sizes in the recent past. They should have carried out various aspects ranging from planning to the phase of testing. They should have the capability and willingness to oversee the entire process and should be there to provide support even after making the software live.

• The Workday financial management implementation partner should always be up to date on Workday's latest updates and products.

• They should possess up-to-date knowledge of Workday's latest updates and products.

• The potential Workday Financial Management implementation partner offers impeccable time and project managerial skills.

• They offer ongoing support resources for up to 12 to 18 months after the implementation finally goes live.

2. Inadequate Documentation

Workday is a customizable tool, and this is one of the most significant benefits for business organizations. However, it is a fact that the more customizations you end up adding to a system, the more complexities there will be that may affect the implementation procedure. Without adequate documentation to provide a clear understanding of your present or proposed operations of Workday, your organization may eventually run into several frustrating snags. This, in turn, will make it a struggle for the employees to use the tool effectively. The Workday experts, thus, suggest documenting a standard operating process that clearly explains the way by which a concerned company will utilize the Workday Financial Management system.

3. Migration of all Business Data

Migration of all business data is one of the most common hurdles for several business organizations during the phase of implementing Workday Financial Management software. Most of us are familiar with the traditional data adage of “Garbage in, garbage out”. However, matching all the formats of data between the two systems proves to be a pretty daunting task. If the data migration is not done correctly, then there can be several issues regarding the integrity of the data. The most likely problems are duplicate data, incorrect data, & long-term issues while uploading data in different formats. A well-trained and experienced consultant can provide all the best practices for the purpose of data migration and ensure that everything goes right the very first time.

4. The Phase of Testing Before Implementation

The implementation of any new software primarily requires several phases of testing. Several companies adopting Workday Financial Management software wait until the end phase of implementation. In the entire process, there runs a very high risk of delaying things. For instance, if you are running certain quality checks before going live and then find an issue, it will take even longer to fix the issue and make necessary changes to the complete system. However, if you discover the issue earlier while in the process, there may be a requirement for making just a few changes.

5. Maintenance of the System

Changes and updates are inevitable and continue to happen to your company and Workday software. If the integration of the newly implemented Workday Financial Management software is not maintained, it could lead to certain inaccurate metrics, and the entire operation of the software may be disrupted.

6. Updates During the Process of Implementation

As the trends reveal for large companies, it may take up to four to six months for larger companies to implement several features in Workday. Workday usually releases annual updates. If these updates are released within the period of installation or just after going live, that may create a more complicated situation. The solution for this is again documentation. When updates are expected & documented, it makes the entire process easier and seamless.

7. Communication

Implementing Workday Financial Management truly involves several different teams. Business organizations usually take the initiative of looping in leadership. This is a great starting point, but the challenges of implementation start to appear when the organizations do not include mid-level managers and users. Any gap in communication between these particular teams can be a major cause of failure.

8. Inadequate Workday Training

At times, several companies think that when the implementation of Workday is nearing the end, they are done with Workday. This is not a correct conception. The implementation of Workday Financial Management can be considered successful only when the supposed end-users adopt it and you have all the data to ensure that the software implementation is successful. If it does not happen like that, it is likely because of poor training. Some of the probable reasons for this are inadequate training time, poor training approaches, and insufficient resources. So, every company adopting Workday Financial Management should have a particular focus on imparting professional Workday training to the end users.

Future Trends in the Field of Workday Financial Management

Machine Learning and AI

ML & AI have played a very crucial role in considerably revolutionizing the financial management by Workday. Integrating these technologies will considerably enhance predictive analytics, automate routine tasks, and provide deeper insights into a large amount of financial data.

Blockchain

Blockchain technology is being increasingly used in financial management. Workday is exploring the usage of blockchain to improve security, transparency, and efficiency in financial transactions.

Better Level of User Experience

Workday is in the process of improving its clients’ overall experience by updating its interface from time to time. It makes it easier for several users to navigate the complete system & also access all the necessary information that is required.

Better Integration Capabilities

As several progressive businesses are increasingly adopting various advanced digital solutions, its seamless integration is very crucial. Workday is enhancing its integration capabilities to ensure smooth interoperability with other enterprise systems.

Conclusion

Choosing the perfect financial management solution is very crucial for the success of any business enterprise. Workday Financial Management is a highly useful cloud-based software that helps several progressive businesses streamline their financial processes, gain valuable real-time insights, & drive tremendous growth. By thoroughly understanding the characteristics, benefits, & steps of implementation of Workday through Workday financial management certification, business enterprises can make more and more informed decisions and achieve several financial goals.

Categories: : Workday Finance Training