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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Expenses

Setup Considerations: Expenses

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Workday Expenses functionality. 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:
  • Other setup considerations for details on specific features.
  • Task instructions for specific configuration details.

What It Is

Workday Expenses provides a comprehensive platform that enables you to manage and control expenses for your company and its payees.
With Workday Expenses, you can configure and manage:
  • Payment elections.
  • Expense reimbursement rates.
  • Expense items.
  • Expense reports.
  • Spend authorizations.
  • Cash advances.
  • Credit cards.
  • Travel booking records.
You can process expenses for:
  • Candidates.
  • Contingent workers.
  • External committee members.
  • Pre-hires.
  • Students.
  • Workers.

Business Benefits

  • Centralize tasks and reports for self-service users so they can easily manage their expenses.
  • Complete on-the-go expenses quickly to speed up reimbursement.
  • Eliminate manual paper processes.
  • Enable machine learning to assess expense reports for anomalies, duplication, and inaccuracies.
  • Increase accuracy and reduce manual entry by calculating expense transaction data automatically.
  • Manage workloads by delegating tasks.
  • Meet international and regional tax rules and reimbursement requirements.
  • Set spending limits to control travel and entertainment costs.
You can quickly exchange and report on data:
  • When you use Workday Expenses along with other Workday products, such as Human Capital Management (HCM). Example: You can create expense items and associate them with allowance plans.
  • With analytics and reporting that provide insight into budgeted and actual spend.

Use Cases

You can:
  • Apply maximum daily amounts to limit spending.
  • Audit expense reports for compliance.
  • Define rates that help calculate reimbursement.
  • Import and process data from credit card and travel booking providers.
  • Process company, intercompany, mobile, and multicurrency expense reports.
  • Track, analyze, and report on spend across your company and its organizations.
You can also manage and control spend using:
  • Allowance plans, budget checks, and commitment accounting.
  • Custom validations, tax rules, and worktags.
  • Spend authorizations.
You can settle and reimburse expenses for:
  • Cash advance requests.
  • Corporate credit card transactions.
  • Out-of-pocket transactions.

Questions to Consider

Question
Considerations
How do you want to reimburse expense payees?
You can set up payment elections to:
  • Determine reimbursement methods, such as by check or direct deposit.
  • Enable workers to set their preferred country and currency for payments or split payment between multiple countries and currencies.
You can also apply rules to payment election options to determine payment methods or payment distributions.
How do you use rates to calculate expense reimbursement?
You can configure rate tables and rules that assess expense items to:
  • Calculate reimbursement amounts.
  • Determine reimbursement eligibility.
  • Validate maximum reimbursable amounts.
You can calculate reimbursement using rate tables based on amounts and percentages.
You can also use expense accumulators to track incremental increases on expense items over time, such as distance-based expenses.
What details do you need from expense payees to reimburse them?
You can configure expense reports to gather information at header level. Examples: Business purposes and memos.
You can also request and require more specific detail at line level on:
  • Expense reports.
  • Spend authorizations.
You can use:
  • Distance-based expense items to calculate mileage.
  • Itemization to require a cost breakdown of incurred expenses.
  • Per diem expense items to meet requirements in your country.
  • Travel journals to itemize expenses from business trips.
  • Workday-delivered attributes and configurable attributes.
Do you want to enable specific workers to create expense reports on behalf of others?
You can enable workers to create expense reports on behalf of:
  • Candidates.
  • Delegates.
  • External committee members.
  • Other workers.
  • Pre-hires.
  • Students.
What expense reporting methods do you need to configure?
You can set up different methods of expense reporting according to business needs, including:
  • Expense reports with negative reimbursable amounts for workers that incur personal expenses on corporate liability credit cards.
  • Intercompany expense reporting when your company has an agreement to split costs with other companies.
  • Receipt scanning to expedite expense claims that payees submit on mobile devices.
How do you want to format print layouts on expense reports?
You can use Workday-delivered options to print expense reports.
You can also use Report Designer in Workday Studio to customize print layouts for:
  • Alerts.
  • Attachments.
  • Instructions.
  • Layouts.
  • Logos.
  • Messages.
How do you want to manage preauthorization of spend?
You can enable or require workers to request spend authorizations before they incur expenses.
You can also:
  • Approve cash advance requests.
  • Enable specific workers to create spend authorizations on behalf of nonworkers.
  • Freeze spend authorizations.
  • Mass close spend authorizations that you no longer need.
  • Perform budget checks on spend authorizations.
  • Use commitment accounting to account for future expenses.
How do you want to set up expense credit cards?
You can set up:
  • Central travel cards to consolidate organization-wide air travel on a single credit card.
  • Individual credit cards for expense payees.
You can specify payment responsibility for worker credit cards using different corporate billing account types.
You can also enable workers to:
  • Manually enter credit card transaction data.
  • Reassign corporate credit card transactions between workers.
  • Submit credit card transactions with negative reimbursable amounts.
How can workers add travel data on expense reports?
You can download travel booking records from your travel provider and import them into Workday.
When you import travel booking records, workers can add these items on expense reports:
  • Air travel.
  • Car rental.
  • Hotel reservations.
What tax information do you want to capture from worker expenses?
You can configure tax rules and enable tax on expense reports. Workday then calculates tax on expense items, enabling you to recover partial or full amounts for:
  • Goods and Services Tax (GST).
  • Value Added Tax (VAT).

Recommendations

We recommend that you:
  • Configure instructional text for your expense reports to help workers comply with expense policies.
  • Contact Workday Professional Services or your consultant to integrate with credit card or travel providers.
  • Enable commitment accounting for spend authorization transactions to help prevent overspending.
  • Review and standardize expense policies for your company before setting up Workday Expenses, to help ensure compliance.
  • Use configuration that streamlines the reimbursement process to reimburse payees quickly. Example: You can enable workers to claim quick expenses on mobile devices.

Requirements

To enable workers to submit expense reports, set up at least 1 expense item and reimbursement type.

Limitations

You can only:
  • Enable mobile receipt scanning for workers based in specific countries.
  • Set 1 payment preference rule for expense payments.
We don't support certified documentation storage for expense report receipts and attachments.

Tenant Setup

Use the
Edit Tenant Setup - Financials
 task to configure tenant-wide options for Workday Expenses.
You can use the
Expenses Options
 section to:
  • Bill customers for expense report lines in
    Approved
     status.
  • Control tax defaulting for international expenses.
  • Disable tax on expense reports.
  • Enable workers to request cash advances.
  • Ensure that your organization doesn't bill customers for worker expenses.
  • Expense booked travel booking records before the travel end date.
  • Restrict workers from selecting specific project worktags.
  • Specify the number of years that you want to retain financial data for purged workers.
You can also use the task to specify:
  • If you want to charge amounts against dates at expense report level or expense line level, for budgeting. Example: To avoid expense lines spanning across multiple fiscal periods, you can charge amounts against the overall expense report date.
  • Sequence IDs for expense reports and spend authorizations.

Security

You can access the
Domain Security Policies for Functional Area
 report to view all security domains for Expenses.
The security domains that you can configure include:
Domains
Considerations
Set Up: Payment Election
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables you to set up processing details for payment elections.
Set Up: Expense Item
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables you to set up expense items for workers to use on their expense transactions.
Access Expense Item (Segmented)
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables you to use segment-based security to control access to expense items.
Example: You want to display a set of expense items only to employees in the Sales department.
Self-Service: Expense Report
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables users to complete and submit expense reports.
Self-Service: Spend Authorization
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables users to submit spend authorization requests before they incur expenses.
Process: Expense Report Work Area
 in the Expenses functional area.
Enables company or organization-based users to maintain expense reports awaiting action in the
Expense Report Work Area
 report.
Set Up: Tenant Setup - Financials
 in the System functional area.
Enables you to access the
Set Up: Tenant Setup - Financials
 subdomain, which you can use to configure tenant-wide options for Workday Expenses.

Business Processes

Business Process
Considerations
Expense Report Event
Enables you to:
  • Audit expense reports to ensure compliance with travel and expense policies.
  • Capture feedback by including questionnaires on expense reports.
  • Check budgets.
  • Confirm accurate taxes on expense reports.
  • Retrieve expense report data for reporting.
  • Send back expense lines for correction.
  • Track projects.
Expense Report Intercompany Event
Enables you to:
  • Initiate the approval process for companies on expense report lines and itemizations.
  • Hold the affiliate company on expense lines and itemizations accountable for worker spend.
Spend Authorization
Enables you to:
  • Add allowance plans for employees requesting spend authorizations.
  • Check budgets.
  • Enable cash advance requests.
  • Include questionnaires on spend authorizations.
Spend Authorization Mass Close Event
Enables you to close multiple unused spend authorizations when your organization no longer needs to process expense reports against them.

Reporting

You can access the
Workday Standard Reports
 report to view all reports for Workday Expenses.
Reports and Dashboards
Considerations
Expense Audit Work Area
 report.
View expenses by their reporting and payment categories and use reports and graphs to analyze spending.
Expense Report Work Area
 report.
View expense reports with actions outstanding. You can use this report to review, send back, and approve expense reports.
Expense Management dashboard.
Use to view information such as:
  • Expense item trends.
  • Expense report totals.
  • Top expense items.
You can also:
  • Access frequently used expense tasks and reports.
  • View and analyze expense information.
Expenses Exceeding Maximum Amount
 report.
View expense report lines and itemizations that exceed the maximum defined amount for the expense item, excluding lines and itemizations identified as personal expenses.
Expenses Hub
 worklet.
View and access expense tasks and reports from a single location.
No Expense Report Submitted
 report.
View workers who haven't submitted expense reports:
  • In a specified timeframe.
  • Using dates that fall within the required reporting period.
You can also create custom reports using report data sources, such as:
  • Expense Reports for Company
    , which enables you to view expense reports for a company or company hierarchy.
  • Tax Rate Application
    , which enables you to view expense reports marked for tax.

Integrations

You can use web services to import data for use with Workday Expenses, such as:
  • Import Credit Cards
  • Import Credit Card Transactions
  • Import Expense Rate Tables
  • Put Expense Item
  • Put Expense Rate Table Rule
  • Put Payment Election Option
Refer to the web service directory on Workday Community for more web services.
You can use integrations to import credit card data from these providers, enabling workers to include credit card data on their expense reports:
  • American Express (AMEX).
  • Mastercard.
  • Visa.
You can import travel booking record data into Workday for workers to include in their expense reports, using the:
  • Import Travel Booking Records
     web service to build custom integrations.
  • Travel Booking Inbound Connector.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Budgets
You can use budget checks to:
  • Automatically check expense transactions against budgets.
  • Prevent overspending to maintain budgets throughout the fiscal year.
Committees
When you set up committees in Workday, you can create expense reports and spend authorizations on behalf of nonworkers to reimburse expenses.
Compensation
You can create reimbursable allowance plans and associate them with expense items so that employees can claim expenses, such as gym membership and tuition reimbursement.
Financial Accounting
You can track:
  • Capital projects and budgets.
  • Expense reports with negative reimbursable amounts.
  • Liquidations for spend authorizations.
  • Spend commitments.
Mobile
You can enable Workday Expenses on mobile so that workers can:
  • Capture quick expenses.
  • Complete and submit expense reports.
  • Scan receipts to populate dates and amounts on expense reports.
HCM
Workday Expenses uses company and employee data from Workday HCM, including data from:
  • Job profiles.
  • Management levels.
  • Staffing models.
  • Workers.
You can also create expense reports on behalf of candidates to reimburse them for expenses incurred during the interview process.
Payroll
You can use company or worker payment elections to determine how to reimburse expenses.
Projects
You can use project tracking with expenses to enable workers to:
  • Access and log time and expenses against specific projects.
  • Claim project expenses within specified date ranges.
Settlement
You can settle payee expenses manually or schedule Workday to create and run settlements automatically for:
  • Cash advances.
  • Credit card transactions.
  • Expense reports.
  • Intercompany expenses.
  • Spend authorizations.
Student
You can grant workers access to student data to enable them to:
  • Create and submit expense reports on behalf of students.
  • Use this data for custom and standard reports.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the You can also configure segmented security to enable workers to access only student expense data.Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.