Setup Considerations: On-Behalf-of Intercompany Activities
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of
on-behalf-of intercompany. 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
On-behalf-of Intercompany is a financial accounting structure that enables transactions
between different entities within an organization. In on-behalf-of intercompany, an
entity pays for a good or service that's purchased by another entity in the
organization.
Business Benefits
You can set up your tenant to record intercompany activities. Recording these activities
enables an organization to generate activities on behalf of another entity:
- Debts
- Payables
- Receivables
Use Cases
You might need to record an accounting transaction that occurs between at least 2 subsidiary
or multinational companies within your organization. Here are a few activities where
intercompany enables you to record those transactions:
- Accounting journals.
- Ad hoc bank transactions.
- Allocations.
- Asset accounting.
- Customer contracts, invoices, and invoice adjustments.
- Intercompany payments.
- Payments on behalf of.
- Payroll accounting.
- Supplier invoices and invoice adjustments.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
Do you have subsidiary companies, or operate
multinationally? | If you have subsidiary companies or multinational branches that
perform transactions with each other, consider configuring intercompany
profiles. Intercompany profiles enable you to record and process those
intercompany transactions. |
Do you need to provide source documents for statutory
requirements? | Transactions between companies in different countries frequently
require source documents for statutory reporting requirements.
On-behalf-of transactions don't generate source documents. Before
you configure intercompany transactions, consider whether you need
to set up direct intercompany. |
What kind of transactions do your subsidiary companies normally
perform with each other? | The transactions that companies within an organization perform with
each other determines whether you need to structure Workday for direct
or on-behalf intercompany. Configure direct intercompany if you need
to represent transactions where the companies conduct business like
a supplier and a customer. You can configure a company as both a
customer and a supplier to another company. Configure
on-behalf intercompany when a company processes the payments and
invoices in place of the company that provides the goods and
services to customers. If both intercompany relationships
apply to you, configure both. |
How do your companies use your account sets? | You can only create an intercompany relationship between 2
companies when those companies use the same account set. Before you
configure your intercompany profiles, ensure that the companies use the
correct account sets. |
How do you process and settle your intercompany
transactions? | If you want to settle your intercompany transactions, you must
configure these options on the Edit Intercompany
Profile task:
If you want to record intercompany receipts automatically,
select the Record Intercompany Receipts check
box.Workday only creates receipts for intercompany payments
matched to an intercompany receivable. Workday doesn't consider
unmatched accounting journals when automatically creating
receipts. When you don't
automatically record receipts, you must create manual receipts to
use in your settlement runs using the Record Intercompany
Receipts task. |
How do you configure your security role assignments? | Workday uses the security configuration of the initiating company
when determining who can view the intercompany transaction. Example: The
company that creates the accounting journal determines the security
requirements to access and process the intercompany
transaction. Workday instead uses the security configuration of
the customer on the original transaction to determine who can view
the intercompany transaction when your company operates as the
supplier. Consider setting up your company hierarchy role
assignments to meet your security requirements if any users need to
access both sides of the intercompany transaction. |
Recommendations
Functionality | Considerations |
|---|---|
Account posting rules | Workday recommends that you configure separate rules for the Intercompany
Payables and Intercompany Receivables account posting
rules if you want to settle intercompany transactions. Separate posting
rules enable Workday to create the payables and receivables necessary
for you to run the settlement process.
When you don't
configure separate account posting rules, you might have trouble
finding unmatched on-behalf-of intercompany transactions when you
want to close your ledger periods. If you configure both
direct and on-behalf-of intercompany, we recommend you add a
Direct Intercompany dimension on both the Intercompany
Payables and Intercompany Receivables account posting
rules. The dimension enables you to split up the account posting
rules you use for on-behalf-of and direct intercompany
transactions.Depending on the transaction types you use, you
also need to configure additional account posting rules. Common
posting rules include:
If you don't want to post intercompany transactions to
Cash , you can instead configure a pseudo bank account to
record the costs. Consider configuring the pseudo bank account when
you want to reroute settlement transactions from the pseudo account
to a different ledger account. |
Fiscal schedules | Workday recommends that companies configured for intercompany
transactions use a shared fiscal schedule. The shared fiscal schedule
can be an alternate or primary schedule. Sharing a fiscal schedule
reduces the potential for creating erroneous transactions that you
need to eliminate using a consolidation. |
Intercompany affiliate worktags | Workday recommends that you enable intercompany affiliate worktags on intercompany
transactions you need. We further recommend that you create custom
validations that require users to add the affiliate worktags on the
associated transaction lines. Intercompany affiliate worktags help
identify due-to and due-from companies on intercompany transactions.
Identifying these worktags enables Workday to eliminate entries on
consolidated financial statements. Workday also recommends
that you configure your account posting rules to use the appropriate
intercompany affiliate worktags as resulting worktags. Workday
strongly recommends that you ensure your configuration doesn't
result in a company creating intercompany transactions with
itself. |
Requirements
Before you can create intercompany transactions, you must:
- Add an initiate intercompany event step on all business processes you want to use for intercompany activities.
- Create intercompany profiles for all your intercompany affiliates on theEdit Company Intercompany Profilestask.
- Configure account posting rules for intercompany payables and intercompany receivables.
Limitations
Before you configure intercompany, consider these limitations:
- If you post intercompany activities to book codes that are outside the common book code, you can't settle those activities. To remove the intercompany balance, perform an elimination.
- If you can't add an intercompany event step to a business process, Workday might not currently support intercompany transactions for that activity.
Tenant Setup
You can optionally configure these tenant options on the
Edit Tenant Setup -
Financials
task:Options | Considerations |
|---|---|
No Intercompany Payable/Receivable Lines when Journals Self
Balance by Company
| When you select this check box, Workday doesn't generate intercompany payable and
receivable lines on journals balanced by each line company. |
Group Intercompany Payable/Receivable
Lines
| Reduces the number of lines generated on the journal and only displays payable and
receivable lines for the transactions. Groups payable and receivable
intercompany line amounts with these same details:
Workday doesn't net payables and receivables on the summary
line. |
Unrestricted Intercompany Affiliate
Selection
| Enables any company to add companies with valid intercompany profiles as intercompany
affiliates on journal lines. |
Copy Attachments to Intercompany Accounting
Journals
| Grant other companies access to attachments you add on intercompany parent journals.
The other companies can view your attachments from their intercompany child
journals. You can only view attachments of companies with a configured
intercompany relationship. |
Security
To create intercompany activities for another company, you must configure security roles for
the activity on the other company. Example: If you're with Company A and you want to
create an intercompany activity for Company B, you must have a security role that
enables you to also create the activity for Company B.
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Set Up: Company Accounting on the Common Financial Management functional
area. | Set up intercompany profiles. You need intercompany profiles to create intercompany
transactions. |
Set Up: Accounting Rules on the Common Financial Management functional
area. | Set up account posting rules. You need separate account posting rules for your
intercompany payables and receivables when you want to settle
intercompany balances. |
Business Processes
Configure the
Accounting Journal Event
business process. Add the Initiate Accounting
Journal Intercompany Event
business process step. Enables you to create
accounting journals for on-behalf intercompany transactions.If your company needs to process and settle on-behalf-of intercompany transactions, configure
the
Settlement Run Event
business process.Reporting
Reports or Dashboards | Considerations |
|---|---|
Intercompany Out of Balance Report
| Identify and resolve intercompany out of balance issues.
|
Intercompany Payables and Receivables
Reconciliation
| Find and review out-of-balance amounts from posted journal lines on intercompany
affiliate ledgers that remain at the end of the period. Enables you to
identify and reconcile all intercompany items for each intercompany
affiliate, including both matched and unmatched transactions. |
Intercompany Work Area
| Review intercompany activities, including in-progress journal lines, unrecorded
receipts, and settlement runs. Enables you to find outstanding amounts
due to or due from an intercompany affiliate. |
Outstanding Intercompany
Transactions
| Find and review detailed information about outstanding intercompany
transactions. |
Integrations
Web Services | Considerations |
|---|---|
Get Account Posting Rule Sets
| Retrieves detailed information about configured account posting
rule sets. |
Get Intercompany Profiles
| Retrieves detailed information about configured intercompany profiles. Enables you to
view detailed information across multiple intercompany profiles. |
Put Account Posting Rule Set
| Creates or configures account posting rule sets. Enables you to set
up many account posting rule sets at once. |
Put Intercompany Profile
| Creates intercompany profiles. Enables you to set up many intercompany profiles at
once. |
Connections and Touchpoints
You can use on-behalf-of intercompany with many activities in Workday. Intercompany expands
existing functionality by enabling you to generate activities on the accounts of
other companies. The intercompany profile you configure enables many intercompany
activities across Workday.
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.