Workday disrupts the pack with a slew of new tech updates

Workday has unveiled new features for its Workday Financial Management and Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud offerings to help businesses better adapt to changing conditions in the world of financial management.

The publisher took advantage of its Workday Rising conference to unveil how organizations can reinvent themselves with its new application, Workday Accounting Center, and new features based on machine learning such as the detection of anomalies in accounting entries. With the power of its "Power of One" approach - a single data source, a single security model, a single user experience, and a single community - Workday is ideally positioned to provide solutions that enable organizations to streamline their business's financial processes and make faster decisions from their data.

With Workday, organizations benefit from a unique system that addresses their planning, execution, analysis and development needs through machine learning and a strong commitment to customer service. By using advanced analytics to bring up trends and information, as well as machine learning to automate manual processes and save time, the publisher is constantly innovating in favor of greater business agility.

Transforming financial management and planning through innovation

CFOs and CFOs are facing constant change and new challenges in a rapidly changing environment driven by advances in technology, the transformation of business models, and the emergence of new competitors. This environment requires them to innovate faster, to make more accurate forecasts, and to provide information that enables the company to react and adapt to changes. These new responsibilities position the DAFs at the forefront of the transformation of their organization.

With the new solutions announced at Workday Rising, companies can now:

Streamline their accounting processes with external and internal data

Workday gives business users the ability to better manage the entire process of creating book and report writes from data enriched with external sources, all thanks to a centralized solution.

• Workday Accounting Center - A new application based on Workday Prism Analytics, will complement the Workday Financial Management platform by helping users manage operational data from a multitude of sources from a single point of control. For example, an insurance company will be able to load transactions (claims and other programs) into the system, create accounting records, generate reports, and analyze them using full data traceability features.

Automate time-consuming processes with machine learning

Workday leverages "data science" capabilities to intelligently automate traditionally heavy-handed processes. With this approach, the system is able to better understand the relationships between financial entities. For example, it can identify links between cost centers, expense categories, projects, regions and currencies to link different business expenses (taxis, airline tickets and hotels). This approach offers different features to save time and resources:

• Journal insights - This new feature for Workday Financial Management customers is able to detect discrepancies in accounting entries by comparing them to other postings related to similar transactions. Accounting teams can identify real-time errors and rectify account reconciliation problems as they occur, instead of at month-end.
• Supplier invoice automation - This new feature allows Workday Financial Management customers to route invoices that require special attention to specific people, taking into account the tasks they have previously performed and their effectiveness in handling similar cases. The first version of this feature relies on rule-based work queues and header-level scans to direct invoices to the right person.
• Expenses via natural workspaces - This tool allows you to enter expense reports in Workday through an integration with Slack. For example, when an employee uploads an image or photo of a receipt into Slack, Workday Expenses uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to automatically identify data, such as the amount to be refunded. The user only has to confirm the sum and then have it approved.
• Anomaly detection for plans - This machine learning feature included in the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud offering will allow customers to detect potential data entry errors in plans, whether it's budgets, forecasts or scenarios. This new feature is able to analyze data histories to detect anomalies, to account for various factors (seasonality and other variations and trends), and to alert users.

Make faster, more informed decisions

Every user can make smarter decisions based on fundamental business analytics, and features that help advance planning at runtime.

• Discovery Boards - So far included in the Workday Prism Analytics offering, this data discovery feature will be available by a simple drag and drop for all customers using Workday Financial Management. Users will be able to view data quickly to better understand their financial reports, detect patterns and learn from them. For example, planning and financial analysis (FP & A) or accounting teams will be able to discover trends in their revenues and expenses, and then analyze them against book ledger accounts, cost centers, or any other dimension of their data sources. With charts and pivot tables, they will see trends by product or region.
• Plan to execute - This new feature available to customers using Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud and Workday Financial Management is a big step forward in the unification between Adaptive Insights and Workday. It allows planning and financial analysis teams to publish their budget plans in Workday. Managers can then compare expenses to plan and automate control based on the approved budget.

Faced with the constant evolution of the finance function, CFOs and other financial managers are looking for tools that will enable their teams to focus on more strategic missions and innovate to increase their company's revenues. Workday integrates new machine learning and advanced analytics technologies at all levels of its solutions to save time and accelerate decision-making with data. By increasing their performance, we help our customers become more agile and immediately create value.

Barbara Larson, General Manager, Workday Financial Management