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Last Updated: 2024-09-20
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Setup Considerations: Allocations in AP&C

Setup Considerations: Allocations in AP&C

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of allocations in Adaptive Planning and Consolidation (AP&C). It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Allocations is a financial process that enables you to:
  • Distribute ledger activity from 1 organization to another.
  • Assign costs within the same company or across companies.
When you process allocations, Workday creates operational journals to record the allocations on the ledgers.

Business Benefits

You can:
  • Maintain more flexibility and greater control over accounting results.
  • Perform complex allocations automatically by defining arithmetic calculations, reducing time and manual effort.
  • Apply reusable filter conditions to your source or basis ledger transactions, to improve configuration and allocation performance.

Use Cases

An account manager or financial analyst can:
  • Distribute IT costs over all cost centers based on headcount.
  • Group allocations by worktag, reducing the number of allocation definitions you need to configure. This saves you time when you manage large amounts of data during close.
  • Allocate marketing expenses to regions based on revenue per region.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
What can you do in Workday if your basis, such as headcount, is a statistic?
Create a statistic definition so you don't have to create 1 retrospectively when you're creating your allocation definition.
What kinds of sources do you have? Are there any you want to exclude from the allocations?
You can filter your allocation definitions so that you only include the sources and basis that you need. You can specify:
  • Fixed rate amounts.
  • Fixed source amounts.
  • Ledgers.
  • Plan structures (for budgets).
What kind of basis types do you have?
You can calculate proration for:
  • Headcount, using percentages.
  • Ledger accounts.
  • Statistic values.

Recommendations

To process allocations faster:
  • Create a statistics definition with a value of 100% and use that as your basis so that Workday can bypass searching every combination of ledger account.
  • Display no more than 50,000 result lines to reduce the number of allocation calculations.
  • Map only the worktags that you need to the target and offset to save yourself manual effort, in addition to reducing processing time.

Requirements

If you want to select a:
  • Headcount basis type, create a headcount definition.
  • Fixed percent pro rata basis type, create a statistic definition with a statistic type of
    Percent
    .

Limitations

You can only:
  • Allocate from budget plan structures when the budgets are approved and no longer in a draft state.
  • View up to 10,000 lines on a statistic without needing to export it.
  • Configure up to 53 allocation downstream dependencies when you schedule or mass finalize allocations unless you configure group sets to be dependent on each other.

Tenant Setup

You can group allocations by the fiscal periods on budget dates.

Security

In the Financial Accounting functional area:
Domains
Considerations
Process: Allocations
Users can process allocations.
Set Up: Allocations
Users can create allocation definitions that specify the:
  • Basis.
  • Offsets.
  • Sources.
  • Targets.

Business Processes

Business Process
Considerations
Allocation Run Event
in the Financial Accounting functional area.
Enables you to run allocations across a company. Workday sets the allocation status to
Pro Forma
.
For allocations that result in a journal, the event also creates a pro forma journal.
Allocation Run Intercompany Event
 in the Financial Accounting functional area.
Enables you to run allocations across multiple companies. The event creates a pro forma intercompany journal for each company.
Budget Amendment Event
 and its security policy in the Budgets functional area.
Enables you to create draft budget amendments for allocations.

Reporting

  • The
    Find Allocations
     report displays allocation results.
  • The
    Allocation Work Area
     report provides detailed information for month end processing.

Integrations

Web Services
Considerations
Get Allocation Definitions
Get Allocation Group Sets
Enables you to fetch allocation definitions or allocation group sets.
Get Financial Condition Rules
Retrieves existing financial condition rules.
Put Allocation Definition
Put Allocation Group Set
You can:
  • Export data to XML files and reconfigure allocation definitions and allocation group sets before resubmitting the web services.
  • Use a unique reference ID to either overwrite existing allocation definitions or allocation group sets or create new allocation definitions or group sets.
Put Financial Condition Rule
You can:
  • Export data to XML files and reconfigure financial condition rules before resubmitting the web service.
  • Use a unique reference ID to either overwrite existing financial condition rules or create new rules.

Connections and Touchpoints

Workday amends your budgets to reflect your allocations.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.