Setup Considerations: Accounting Center

Administrator Guide

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Accounting Center. 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

Accounting Center is a fully integrated solution built on an analytic engine that enables you to:

Bring into Workday high-volume operational transactions from external sources.

Transform and enrich the external business transactions into accounting journals.

Business Benefits

You can:

Ingest, enrich, and transform external transactions into Workday journals.

Manage and track transactions in batches from ingestion to summarized accounting.

Generate detailed and summarized accounting.

Post summarized journals to your ledger.

Report on both the detailed and summarized balances for financial, operational, and managerial reporting in both the primary and alternate ledger accounts.

Close your books with full audit capability.

Use Cases

You can use Accounting Center to bring in and combine external transactions with Workday-generated accounting to include them in your Workday ledger. Example: You might have Point of Sales and subscription billing services that you process in legacy or proprietary systems that you want to report on and analyze in Workday.

Questions to Consider

Questions	Considerations
Will you be ingesting multiple records and including those records in a single transaction?	Ingestion is the process of moving external transactions into a dataset from where you can access and analyze them. Use Transaction Grouping ID in enrichment validation stages and the Accounting Source Configuration to properly group records for: Error Management: Ensures that even if 1 record in the transaction has an error, all records in the transaction error out. Balancing at the transaction level: Ensures that the journal balances at the transaction level. Transaction Grouping ID is alpha-numeric and isn’t case-sensitive.
How many enrichment steps do you want to create for an accounting source?	Enrichment is the process of enhancing your source data so you can use it for detailed and summarized accounting. Example: adding worktag mapping, reformatting or removing field and so on. You can create a maximum of 3 enrichment stages. You can't change the number of enrichment stages once you create the accounting source.
How do you want Workday to process each batch in a stage?	You can configure the Accounting Center Process to specify how you want Workday to process each batch for a stage. You can select to process and advance each batch: Always Advance to Next Stage and Dismiss Any Errors to Next Batch. Manually Select Next Action. Only Advance to Next Stage if No Errors. To remove records from further processing, add a custom dismiss to your process. To specify how you want to process each batch in a stage, access the Edit Accounting Center Process Configuration task and select an option.
Will you be including additional information on the detailed journal lines?	Include fields as additional attributes from the enrichment dataset in the detailed journal lines. Workday recommends you use text as your primary format for attributes.
What information do you want to include on the summarized journal lines?	Use Worktag Mapping Tables and dataset joins to bring necessary business objects into your enrichment datasets. Once these fields exist on your enriched datasets, you can select these fields on your Accounting Source journal line rules.
Will you be using custom validations?	Ensure that your transactions meet your specified conditions by: Creating validation stages in the enrichment datasets for identifying specific errors. Creating critical custom validations for the Accounting Center Detailed Journal type.
Will you be dismissing certain error-free transactions?	Create a custom dismissal step to remove certain transactions from a batch.
Will your ingested data include records with no value?	Ingested records with no value can cause batch errors. Workday must account for every transaction in a batch. You can either: Filter out the records with no value in the derived dataset that is the source for the Data Change Task used in the Accounting Source. This will reduce the count of transactions or records that Accounting Center processes. If you need to maintain records of each ingested record, remove these records from detailed accounting using custom dismissal.
Will you be using custom account posting rule dimensions?	Use a Join to instantiate the custom account posting rule dimension to the applicable field in your ingested data.
Will you be using multicurrency journals?	Consider whether you need to include the instance of the transaction currency code in your enriched data. Also, consider: If you want to record both the transaction amount and the ledger amount. Have Workday calculate the ledger amount using currency conversion rates.
Will the ingestion data include cash journals and will you reconcile the cash journals?	Include the instance of the bank account in your ingested data. Also, include the bank account worktag as a worktag type in the accounting configuration and select Reconcile to Bank . Also, use the Transaction Reference field when selecting Reconcile to Bank . Include condition rules to separate your cash and bank accounts from your other lines.
Do you want to track the number of transactions Workday dismisses from a current batch?	Access the Find Accounting Center Batch report and view the Dismissed Transactions column.
Do you require notifications of certain events as Accounting Center is processing the batch through various stages?	Set up custom notifications in the business process definition using report fields on the Accounting Center event.
Will you be using alternate account sets for reporting?	Access the Edit Company Accounting Details task and select an alternate account set for the company to generate reports that map alternate account sets or statutory account sets to your preferred account set. Once you create or post journals, you can't change the alternate account set.
Will you be controlling access for creating and editing mapping table definitions or mapping tables based on role assignments?	Create and assign roles enabled for Source System. Access the Maintain Assignable Roles task. Enter a role and for the Enable for field , select Source System . Access the View Mapping Table Definition report. From the related actions of the Source System , select Roles Assign Roles . On the Assign Roles task, assign the Source System role you previously created to a user. Create a role-based security group (constrained) using the newly created role. Add the newly created role-based security group (constrained) to the security domain policy for Set Up: Mapping Table Definitions or Set Up: Mapping Tables. Users will only be able to access the Mapping Table Definitions and Mapping Tables, which contain a source system value for which the user has an assigned role.
When will you schedule your weekly maintenance?	Ensure that you don't schedule any jobs or processes to run near the start of your weekly maintenance. Once maintenance starts, all currently active jobs and processes will stop running and error out. As Workday doesn't support an automatic restart, you'll have to restart the jobs or processes manually.

Recommendations

Option	Recommendations
Ingestion Source for Accounting Source	Use a table as your ingestion source. Use the Edit Data Change Task (accessed from the related actions menu of the Data Change Task ) to populate fields on the Accounting Source Ingestion table. Consider using these updates for simple transformations that you might require on your ingestion table: Creating a Transaction Grouping ID. Adding or deriving an accounting date. Field names shouldn't contain: Contain the word 'id.' Contain any special characters (e.g., !@#$%^&*, etc.). Exceed 255 characters in length. End in an underscore. Start with “WPA_” (reserved prefix for Prism system fields).
Enriching Data	Create a new dataset for enrichment between the System Filter {_UnprocessedForBatch} and the User dataset {_UserConfiguration}and perform all enrichment steps in new dataset. When expanding 1 record per transaction into many records per transaction in Enrichment, use Transaction Grouping ID as a unique ID for each row in your ingested data. For complex enrichments, create separate enrichment stages. Separate enrichment stages ensure that Workday persists data at each stage separately, for diagnostic purposes. Keep Mapping and Validation stages separate.
Validating Data	Create a new derived dataset containing your validation stages between the System Filter {_UnprocessedForBatch} and the User dataset {_UserConfiguration}. Add the validation stage on the last Enrichment stage.
Currency Decimal Precision	The transaction and ledger amounts in detailed accounting must match the currency precision of the transaction and ledger currencies. If the amounts don't meet the currency precision of the relevant currencies, you must round these amounts to the correct currency precision in Enrichment.

Requirements

The ledger period must be open for the journal to post.

Before you can initiate a batch, ensure it contains at least 1 transaction.

A stage must be complete with no errors before advancing to the next stage.

Limitations

If there are more than 10,000 validation exceptions, the entire batch errors out.

Summarized journals won't check for budget check and will post even if they cause the budget to exceed.

When entering 2-sided intercompany transactions between companies, you can only have companies with the same ledger currency.

When entering multicurrency transactions, ensure you use the same transaction currency for all journal lines created from a transaction. To accomplish this, you can add transaction currency to your grouping ID if you're using one.

You can't use Worktag Balancing functionality on transactions. Manually configure your accounting source to create the accounting correctly.

For Accounting Center journals, Workday will only support mapping rules from the primary to the alternate account set.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

You can access the

Domain Security Policies for Functional Area

report to view all security domains for Accounting Center.

The security domains that you can configure include:

Domain	Considerations
Process: Accounting Center in the Accounting Center functional area.	Can configure accounting center processes and reports.
Set Up: Accounting Sources in the Accounting Center functional area.	Can create and edit accounting source tasks and web services (except creating and updating mapping table and mapping table definitions).
Set Up: Mapping Tables in the Accounting Center functional area.	Can create and update mapping tables.
Set Up: Mapping Table Definitions in the Accounting Center functional area.	Can create and update mapping table definitions.

Business Processes

Configure the Accounting Center Batch Initiation Event
business process to initiate an accounting center batch.

Configure the Accounting Center Enrichment Event
business process to enrich data.

Configure the Accounting Center Detailed Accounting Event
business process to generate detailed accounting.

Configure the Accounting Center Summarization Event
business process to create summarized accounting.

Reporting

You can access the

Workday Standard Reports

report to view all reports for Accounting Center.

Reports or Dashboards	Considerations
Batches Impacted During Disaster Recovery report	Enables you to identify batches impacted during disaster recovery.
Run Time Metrics at Batch Level report	Enables you to monitor trending run time metrics at batch level.
Run Time Metrics at Batch Stage Level report	Provides trending run time metrics for all stages in a batch or batches.
Run Time Metrics at Batch Run Level report	Enables you to report on trending run time metrics at batch run event level.
View Accounting Source Snapshot report.	Provides details of a specific effective dated accounting source snapshot configuration.

You can also create custom reports using these report data sources:

Accounting Center Batch

Accounting Center Batch Run

Accounting Center Batch Stage

Custom Account Posting Rule Types

Integrations

You can use these web services to migrate and maintain accounting sources between different tenants:

Get Accounting Center Implementations

Put Accounting Center Implementations

Get Source Condition Rules

Get Accounting Source Process Configurations

Get Accounting Source Snapshots

Put Accounting Source Condition Rule

Put Accounting Source Process Configuration

Put Accounting Source Snapshots

You can use these web services to maintain account posting rules or mapping tables in Accounting Center:

Get Custom Account Posting Rule Dimensions

Get Custom Account Posting Rule Types

Get Mapping Table Definitions

Get Mapping Tables

Put Custom Account Posting Rule Dimension

Put Custom Account Posting Rule Type

Put Mapping Table

Put Mapping Table Definition

You can use the
Put Accounting Center Batch
web service to create a new batch.

You can use these web services to retrieve and update resolution details for dismissed transactions:

Get Dismissed Transactions

Put Dismissed Transaction

Refer to the web service directory on Workday Community for more web services.

Connections and Touchpoints

You can use Accounting Center with Financial Accounting to process journals, produce financial records, and perform period and year-end close.

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.