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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Steps: Set Up Accounting Categories

Steps: Set Up Accounting Categories

You can use accounting categories to logically group similar accounting objects for posting, searching, and reporting purposes. You can establish accounting categories for:
  • Customers
  • Suppliers
  • Revenue
  • Spend
  • Business assets
  • Receivable writeoffs
  2. Access the
    Maintain Customer Categories
     task.
    Create customer categories to classify the types of customers you have.
    Example:
    • Technology
    • Hospitality
    You can also add, edit the name of, view usage, or delete a category.
    Security:
    Set Up: Customer Categories
     domain in the Common Financial Management functional area.
  3. Access the
    Maintain Supplier Categories
     task.
    Create supplier categories to classify the types of supplies you want to account for.
    Example:
    • Office Supplies
    • Utilities
    You can also add, edit the name of, view usage, or delete a category.
    Security:
    Set Up: Supplier Categories
     in the Common Financial Management functional area.
  4. Example:
    • Product Sales
    • Interest Income
  5. Access the
    Maintain Receivable Writeoff Reasons
     task.
    Create writeoff categories to describe the receivables you write off.
    Example:
    • Bad Debt
    • Standard Writeoff
    You can also add, edit the name of, view usage of, or delete a category.
    Security:
    Set Up: Receivable Write-off Categories
     in the Common Financial Management functional area.
For all category types, you can use accounting categories to assign as characteristics to accounting objects and people. Workday requires that you assign a category to every customer, supplier, item, business asset, and writeoff. You can then:
  • Report on everything assigned to a specific category.
  • Route transactions to the appropriate ledger accounts by using categories as conditions in account posting rules.
  • Search for and find groups of objects or people according to a specific category.
For spend and revenue categories you can:
  • Use the categories as worktags.
    Example: When you create a journal, tag it with a spend or revenue category.
  • Write transactions against a category without having to specify items.
    Example: When you create an invoice, write a line and its amount to a general category instead of a specific item.