12 Decimal Place Currency Conversion
Does this feature impact historic reporting? Or are there any negatives from that perspective, particularly if you 've done manual workarounds?
No, this shouldn 't necessarily have an impact on historic reporting. However, it's worth carefully considering when you start loading more precise conversion rates to figure out when during a month or when during a year you do that. Because if you move from less precise to more precise rates in the middle of the month, for example, that might cause some revaluation issues. So THAT's the thing I'd consider versus worrying about the impacts on historic reporting.
Account Reconciliation Templates
If you were currently using Excel or had integrated a third-party reconciliation tool with Workday, what would be the tipping point where you 'd recommend using ONLY workday for reconciliation and move away from third party?
This depends quite a bit on the unique situation of your business. You 'll need to determine where you 're gleaning value from your third-party solution, and then you can assess that against Workday 's functionality. If you 're interested in getting any help with that assessment, you can reach out to us via the contact methods Shelly mentioned already [email, instant messaging on our website, our
Contact Us form] and Kainos can help you out with that process.
Workday-Driven Tax Defaulting
Is there a best-practice approach or safe way to implement the new tax-defaulting functionality when moving from basic to the expanded defaulting?
It's going to depend to a large degree on how radical of a shift it is that you 're looking to make. I would assume that for most people it's probably not too radical. There are three things to consider here:
- The first is that you need to do an assessment of how stable those new dimensions are that you 're wanting to incorporate in to the defaulting logic. So if they're changing frequently, maybe reconsider using those as part of your tax-defaulting logic.
- The second would be to consider phasing this in based on region—especially if you have really complex tax situations. Like if you're active somewhere like Latin America, you may want to focus on stabilisation before moving on to other areas.
- Finally, if you 're already live, any changes that you make should be tested in sandbox prior to moving them in to production—which I'm sure you already know but it's worth repeating.
Line-Level Send Back on Expense Reports
On expense reports, when lines are sent back is there functionality to reimburse a partially approved expense report?
If you mean can you approve the lines that WERE approved, the answer is yes. You can go ahead and reimburse those approved lines while continuing to deal with those lines that were rejected separately. That's going to improve the timeliness of those reimbursements, which your users will be happy about.
OCR for Supplier Invoices
Is OCR only available for US data like with expenses, or has it crossed the pond?
All the early adopters are in the US, so it seems like they're focusing on the US prior to rolling it out around the world.
When is OCR going to be available to all?
That's not something that Workday has officially released. They release these things out in three phases. The first is early adopters, which is what we have right now. The second will be fast followers, which is still on an application basis. You go to Workday and say 'I'd like to use this new functionality. When can we get onboard?' And then finally it's general availability. And I'd expect general availability in three or four updates from now.
Will the OCR system read as soon as the invoice is uploaded, or is there any time delay to be aware of?
The demos all show it going in as soon as it's uploaded. That being said, what often happens is that once they go out there to these early adopters and start dealing with higher volumes of data, sometimes the way these things work changes. The Worksheets functionality is an example of this. They had a really, really detailed change-tracking functionality. When they rolled it out to customers, they realised that these people were putting large volumes of information in to Worksheets, and so that level of detail in the tracking wasn't terribly feasible. That might end up being the case with OCR. I hope not. I'd like to see it continue to be in real time, but it's definitely something to keep an eye out for. Maybe try to get in contact with some of those early adopters to see how it's developing.
Is the OCR for invoice planned to work for supplier invoice requests as well?
I don't know. Not to the best of my knowledge, though that would make sense. Because the idea behind a supplier invoice request is that you have somebody who is NOT in accounts payable who has physically received those documents. This is another example of where it's a good idea to reach out to those early adopters, hear their feedback, and encourage them to suggest to Workday that that be added if it's not already out there.
Is there a list of early adopters for OCR?
Unfortunately there isn 't (largely because some companies opt to keep their participation in early adopter programs confidential). However, you can probably get a partial list from Workday by contacting your Workday customer success manager, who will hopefully have insight into who the early adopters are as well as which ones are ok with having their information shared.
We already use an OCR system. Are the benefits of being on a single platform really worth the move when Workday makes it available? Especially if OCR isn 't their specialty?
This is largely going to boil down to the functionalities that your OCR solution provides and which of those functionalities are the most valuable to you. One of the main benefits of Workday's solution is the fact that Workday knows what a Workday system needs from a data perspective. So as Workday continues to improve that solution, they're going to improve it in a way that is uniquely equipped to facilitate the entry of data in to Workday. This will reduce cost and effort when compared to a third-party provider. That being said, this product is in its early stages, so there 's still a lot to learn about the functionality and its potential benefits.
Slack for Expenses
Can we use Microsoft Teams instead of Slack?
The information we have from Workday product management is that they have now completed work on employee lookup, anytime feedback, and time off for MS Teams, but Expenses is not fully developed. Workday for MS Teams is currently only being made available to early adopters, and more information about that program
can be found here.
Workday is planning to have a native connection to Microsoft Teams for Expenses, but it won't be available in the Workday 33 release. Once that's built, Kainos can help you expand that functionality through Workday Cloud Platform if you would like to be able to perform additional tasks and have additional functionality through Teams. If you'd like to learn more about ways that Kainos can help you use Workday Cloud Platform to extend this functionality or to create custom applications, business processes, etc.,
please feel free to reach out, and I can put you in contact with some of our Workday Cloud Platform experts!
Other topics
Are there any significant features planned for Adaptive Insights in Workday 33?
Workday is slowly marching towards that holy grail of completely incorporating Adaptive Insights into Workday and making it one clean platform. They're not there 100% for Workday 33. However, what they HAVE done is made improvements to the security model to allow the security model in Workday to be more effectively applied in Adaptive Insights for the purposes of decentralised planning and all that. If you'd like to get more information about Adaptive Insights, reach out to us and we can chat about what we're seeing.
We have companies that are suppliers AND customers. Any netting functionality available?
I regret to say that, to the best of my knowledge, this is not available yet. There IS, however, a good contributed solution on Community
by Steve Brandt. It is, admittedly, a workaround. But it is a good workaround.
Will PO and PO line custom objects still be accessible by related action, and can you put them directly on the PO header or line detail with the new update?
It appears that this update will have no effect on custom objects for purchase orders. As far as anyone knows right now, they'll continue to function the same as they have up until this point. However, I suggest that you use
Workday 's release preparation centre to stay on the lookout, because it might just be a feature that they haven 't officially announced yet.
