May 2021
FINANCE
Workday Monthly Newsletter: FIN Edition
Revenue Categories

Revenue categories are a classification for revenue streams; they are required for most income transactions and mapped to ledger accounts for financial reporting. They classify the revenue sources from various funding sources and post the transaction to the corresponding G/L account. These can be placed in a revenue category hierarchy and were previously known as object codes.

Examples of these include:

  • Tuitions and Fees
  • State Appropriations
  • Federal Grants, State Grants, and Local Grants
Spend Categories
Expenses are categorized and posted to G/L accounts utilizing spend categories in Workday. When creating requisitions and auditing credit card transactions, it will be essential to use “spend categories,” instead of individual codes; there will be no need to be purchasing experts with Workday because of this functionality. 

Spend categories provide a way to organize, track, and report on business assets. All trackable items must have a spend category. Likely, the business asset you want to track is already associated with a spend category. Spend categories are a prerequisite for capitalizing business assets and tracking custodianship. For capitalized business assets, make sure that the spend category has a depreciation profile associated with it. A spend category is also used to post a transaction to the correct G/L account without the user having to memorize the fund, functional organization, and G/L account. 

Workday automatically posts to the G/L, thereby reducing the need for reclass entries.
Cost Centers
Always think “department” when you think of a cost center. Cost centers track financial activity related to spend and revenue transactions and typically represent defined business segments. The manager and employees of a cost center are responsible for its costs but are not accountable for generating revenue or making investment decisions.

In Workday, cost centers are a type of organization and are a key component of Workday Finance since they track transactions with a financial impact.

Worktags
Worktags are a key component of Workday as a financial system, especially for P2P. Worktags are keywords that you can assign to transactions and supporting data to make their business purposes clear and establish common relationships through classification. They are combined to categorize transactions accurately. Worktags can be assigned to a department and a project on expense reports and purchase orders. With Workday’s FDM, reports can be run to view total expenses for each Worktag. 

Additionally, you can use Worktags to: 

  • Track customers, cost centers, and suppliers on invoices.
  • Capture information about a workers’ hours for costing, specific projects, and budgeting.
Projects
Worktags provide a single secure source of truth to view and act on a project, billing, and financial data. Now, you’ll have more accurate billing, revenue recognition, margin and profitability analysis, and financial reporting. The changes to come involving projects in Workday will streamline processes and make your work easier. 

Today, budget requests come to the Budget Office via email, but with the implementation of Workday, the process will be electronic and included in the system. Currently, the Budget Office creates a new unit number (identifying digits in an account number) for each facility improvement or capital project. Worktags will be attached to financial transactions rather than tracking project budgets in an Excel spreadsheet and tracked using project hierarchies and project groups within Workday. 

Colleague does not have a way to report on aggregate spending across fiscal years. Employees manually pull the data; then, they add fiscal year totals to determine the lifetime spend on grants or projects. Workday enables projects to be tracked for accounting, similarly to how it will work for grants. The new functionality for projects aligns with the ACC Strategic Plan, Goal Four (Effective and Efficient Operations and Infrastructure), which saves time and creates efficiencies.
Grants
Workday will simplify managing, tracking, and reporting awards by reducing manual handoffs and integration points. Workday generates accounting transactions related to grant activity, including revenue recognition and associated journal entries. Integrated time and effort reporting and improved visibility of award activity will streamline the affiliated processes. 

The Institutional Planning, Development, and Evaluations department creates the award proposal budget in Grant Navigator. R2R reviews, updates, and approves the award proposal budget in Colleague. After Go-Live, these tasks will be completed in Workday. Proposal award configuration will be completed in Workday before R2R approves budgets, and R2R will have visibility to every step associated with awards. Roles related to grant management can easily be edited and assigned in Workday; this process change will impact R2R.

Today, award activity is tracked manually, and there’s no comprehensive overview of the process available. Workday provides the ability to assign tasks, due dates, roles, and milestones, and review the completion status. The stakeholders are the Cost Center Managers (formerly Budget Authorities), R2R, and B2P.

New notifications and alerts are available with Workday for government grants when specific criteria are met. Currently, there are no system automated notifications; this system functionality affects A/P staff and leadership, B2P, and R2R.
Glossary
  • Cost Center – Administrative units with budgets where revenue and expenses are tracked.
  • Functional Classification – Is considered a Worktag, and it correlates to the National Association of College and University Business Officers’ (NACUBO) codes (formerly referred to as the Element of Cost). Allows roles to be assigned for business process approval and reporting. 
  • Fund – An organizational Worktag required for every financial transaction and will default based on the cost center, grant, or project. A fund identifies a group of Workday ledger accounts with the same funding source; each fund will produce a balanced financial statement. 
  • General Ledger (G/L) Accounts – A G/L account is used to sort, store, and summarize an organization’s financial transactions.
  • Accounts – Define where to place debits and credits of a transaction; these represent the natural account (e.g., Accounts Receivable (A/R), Accounts Payable (A/P), salary expenses, etc.). 
  • Account Types – Define the types of accounts that are available for financial statements (e.g., Assets, Liabilities, Income, and Expenses). 
  • Account Sets – Define a group of G/L accounts for a company, also known as the chart of accounts. 
  • Account Summaries – Roll-up of select accounts from a given account set into a group for financial statement reporting. 
  • Location – Allows organizations to review revenue and cost breakdowns and associated profit by location. A location can be required on all transactions used to track people and business assets. 
  • Organization – Worktags that enable the grouping of resources. Organizations generally have Members and Roles that support a specific business function. Organizations have hierarchies.
  • Spend Categories – Used to classify expenses on the income statement and assets on balance sheets. Spend categories are meant for use in certain operational transactions:
  • Procurement transactions (requisition, purchase order, supplier contract, etc.)
  • Supplier invoice
  • Ad hoc payment (e.g., sales tax remittance)
  • Worktag – A named attribute assigned to transactions to indicate their business purpose. For example, customer Worktag’s values could be the customers’ names. 
  • Worker An employee (all employee types).
Training
Workday training is currently being developed. For updates on what training is available, refer to this section of the newsletter each month and the Training and Resources section of the ACC Workday Website. Training materials will include job aids, instructional videos, presentations, and instructor-led training.
Help & Support
Along the journey to Workday’s launch in the Fall and even beyond the go-live, support systems will be available to help if you run into any questions. First, consult the Workday website, which will be continuously updated with new Training and Resources materials. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, reach out to one of the Change Champions

The Change Champion Network is a grassroots effort to communicate, advocate for, and support organizational change, specifically the Workday implementation. Members of the Change Network (referred to as Change Champions) meet monthly to review materials to share with their colleagues. 

If the website doesn’t cover your question or a Change Champion isn’t available, send your questions regarding specific process changes or other issues to Workday@austincc.edu. Support is always available to all ACC employees.