Financial Accounting
What is it?
When we say Financial Accounting, we mean …
- Maintaining the general ledger, processing journals and handling intercompany transactions to ensure that all financial activity is accurately captured and classified within Workday
- Supporting the financial close process by executing period-end tasks such as closing accounting periods and performing allocations to ensure the completeness and accuracy of financial data at the end of each reporting cycle
- Generating and analyzing financial reports to provide insights into the organization’s financial performance to support decision-making and compliance
Key Terminology
An operational transaction is a task in Workday that end users complete to interact with the system to complete a financial activity. The layout of the operational transaction has fields which are specific to the type of transaction. When approved, these automatically create an operational journal.
Legacy Term: Sub-system Journals
Accounting journals (generally referred to as “journals” in Workday) are created manually to directly record accounting data and are not associated with operational transactions.
Legacy Term: Manual Journal/Journal Entry
Accounting adjustment is a type of operational journal to reclassify costs on expense reports, P-card transactions and most supplier invoices if there was an error in the operational transaction.
Legacy Term: E2E Journal
Journal attribute that defines the source for each operational or accounting journal.
Legacy Term: Journal Source
An account or record used to sort and store balance sheet and income statement transactions. Ledger Account Summaries (e.g., Tuition and Fee Revenue) are used to create financial statement lines primarily for statutory external reporting. Note that an account set is a group of ledger account numbers that you can use to track financial activities.
Legacy Term: N/A
Provides a lower level of detail from the Ledger Account needed for operational reporting. They are used to identify and categorize the different types of expenditures reported within Workday. Also used as a dimension in account posting rules for procurement and spend that drives accounting behavior.
Legacy Term: Expense GL Account Code
Provides a lower level of detail from the Ledger Account needed for operational reporting. Revenue categories are required for Customer and Sponsor Invoices. They are used to identify and categorize the different types of revenues reported within Workday.
Legacy Term: Revenue GL Account Code
Workday’s “accounting engine” that uses rulesets to determine how ledger accounts are derived on journal entries based on key dimensions.
Legacy Term: N/A