1. General
2. Expense Reports
3. Grants
4. Requisitions and Supplier Invoices
5. Workflow Notifications
6. Designees – not workflow related but an important communication
Welcome to this week’s supplemental newsletter designed to focus on Workday topics, changes, tips and tricks, etc. This week’s topic is Workflow.
Throughout this newsletter, the term “spend transaction(s)” is meant to reference expense reports, requisitions, supplier invoices and procurement card verifications.
Generally, workflow is configured based on roles and people who occupy those roles. In some cases, multiple people hold the same role (in a “pool” of approvers). If multiple people hold the same role, the transaction and notification will go to all those in the pool until one person acts on it. As soon as one person acts on it, it will come out of the task box of the others. Therefore, if you are attempting to get to a transaction from the email notification and find that it is not there, it may be because another person in the pool of approvers has already acted on it.
The following are common roles used in Workday workflow:
Initiator – the person who filled out and initiated the transaction.
Employee as Self – On expense reports, if the payee has delegated the task to someone else, the payee still needs to approve and holds this named role.
Accounts Payable Operations Lead – this is Tamara Harley and Erinn Savage in Accounts Payable. Note, a significant change from WFS is that spend transactions are routed to Accounts Payable as one of the first steps. All the remaining approvers can feel comfortable that the supporting documentation is sufficient, the dollar amounts match the expense report lines and it passes general University policies.
Cost Center Manager – for academic departments this is the Department Chair. For all others, this is department specific configuration.
Cost Center Manager Level 2 – required if the dollar amount is greater than or equal to $1,000. For academic departments this is the Office of Academic Affairs. For all others, this is department specific configuration.
Cost Center Manager Level 3 – required if the dollar amount is greater than or equal to $5,000. This is the Cabinet Member of the particular area unless the Cabinet Member has delegated the approval to someone else. For example, in the academic departments, this may be Mark Hovey.
Tax Manager – This is Christine Rodrigue in the Finance Office. Transactions are routed to this role if the supplier is a non-US Citizen or any of the spend categories require tax withholding, such as the Connecticut Athlete’s and Entertainer’s tax.
Benefits Partner – This role is part of the expense report workflow if the payment is a tuition reimbursement. It will route to the Benefits Office for review.
Spend Category Manager – Certain spend categories route to certain people for approval. Examples of this are 1) Bill Nelligan approves any spend transaction that uses the Hazardous Waste or Equipment Purchase Research spend category 2) Bob Elsinger approves any spend transaction that uses the Technology Equipment Computers spend category.
Designee Manager – If the designee is a faculty member, and the transaction was not initiated by that faculty member, the faculty member holds the role of Designee Manager and the transaction will be routed for approval if the worktag is used.
Designation Manager – This is primarily used for the Faculty Research designations and this role is held by Joy Vodak. It will route to her if any of the faculty research designations are used.
Principal Investigator – This role is held by Grant PIs and will be routed to them if a grant worktag is used
Project Manager – This role is primarily held by individuals in Facilities for capital projects. However, it is also used for faculty startup and will route to that particular faculty member for approval when the project worktag is used
Grant Manager – This role is held by Kim Savinelli and Crystal Flores in the Grants Office. Transactions will route to them if a grant worktag is used.
Investment Pool Manager – This role is held by Kim Savinelli and Crystal Flores. Transactions will route to them if a gift worktag is used.
Finance Executive – This role is held by Chris Olt and Valerie Nye. Transactions will route to them if the dollar amount is greater than or equal to $10,000.
There are two major concepts to keep in mind when it comes to workflow:
1. An initiator cannot approve their own.
2. A person cannot approve the transaction twice. This is an improvement from WFS where a person might have had to approve the same transaction more than once because they were in multiple roles.
If Workday sees that the approver is also the initiator or the person already approved a transaction as part of a different role, it will look for someone else to approve in that role either by seeing if anyone else holds that role as part of a “pool” of approvers or by jumping to the next level. Note that it will only jump to the next level once and if it also finds a restriction at that level (initiator or prior approver) the transaction will get “stuck” or go unassigned. Therefore, approvers should be sensitive to some of the transactions they are initiating, recognizing this initiation takes them out of the approval process and if there is no one else to approve based on the above rules, it will get stuck. In some cases, it may be beneficial to have someone else initiate the transaction.
Workflow can be viewed from specific tabs on the spend transactions as follows:
Supplier invoice, requisition and procurement card verification– Process History tab
Expense Report – Business Process tab. Be sure you are in your own account and not accessing as a delegate to another account. This tab only appears from your own account.
We acknowledge the feedback of wanting to view the “remaining process”. This is not currently available but we are researching options.
As of today, we have made significant changes to workflow for expense reports. Based on user feedback, expense reports will no longer require the approval of the payee’s “manager”. In place of that role, it will go to the Cost Center Manager from the first dollar. Therefore, the workflow path of an expense report is as follows:
Employee as Self – if the expense report was initiated by a delegate. The person being paid needs to provide a “stamp of approval” indicating the expense report accurately reflects what occurred.
Accounts Payable – if there is a reimbursement owed to an employee.
Cost Center Manager
If required – Cost Center Manager 2 (if greater than or equal to $1,000), Cost Center Manager 3 (if greater than or equal to $5,000), Finance Executive (if greater than or equal to $10,000), Benefits (if tuition reimbursement), Grant PI, Grant Manager, Designee Manager, Designation Manager, Project Manager, or Gift Manager if specific worktags used.
3. GRANTS
Based on user feedback, as of today, we have made a significant change to the workflow for spend transactions that contain a grant worktag. These spend transactions will no longer require Cost Center Manager approval. For Academic departments, this means that these will no longer go to the Chair of the department but only to the Grant PI and then other worktag approvers as necessary (Grants Office, Cost Center Managers 2 and 3 etc.)
4. REQUISITIONS AND SUPPLIER INVOICES
Requisitions, including OneSource, go through the following approvals:
Tax Manager if the supplier is a non US Citizen
Spend Category Manager if a specific spend category is used as described in section 1
All other roles described in section 1 if applicable with the exception of Accounts Payable. Requisitions do not require Accounts Payable approval.
If a requisition is only charging a cost center and is less than $500, no approval is required except if it is initiated by a student. Requisitions initiated by a student will go to the cost center manager from the first dollar.
If a supplier invoice is created from a requisition, Workday will recognize the requisition approvals and therefore only require the approval of Accounts Payable. This is an improvement from WFS where both the purchase order and voucher went through the same approval path. Workday eliminates this duplication, recognizes the previous requisition approvals and only requires accounts payable unless the dollar amounts are materially different (greater than 10% or $100) or the worktags have changed.
If a supplier invoice was not created from a requisition, it will go through the same approvals as the requisition except Accounts Payable is at the beginning of the process, similar to the expense report.
The default notification is that an approver will receive an email notification as soon as a spend transaction hits their task box. Users can configure the notifications to either one email every day or turn off the email notifications altogether by going to their account/change preferences and scroll to “Background Notification Preferences”.
This will present all of the system notifications. However, the ones specific to financial approvals are found in the Parent Notification Type Business Processes. You can see the options of Immediately (default), Daily (one per date) or Mute (turn off). If you choose to turn them off, be sure to actively monitor your task box within workday as this does not eliminate the need to approve transactions.
Important note on expense report notifications – we determined that the “employee as self” approval role was not receiving email notifications and have fixed that configuration. However, it is important to note that if a budget warning is triggered on an expense report that was initiated by a delegate, that budget warning is going to the “employee as self” without a notification. There is an additional delegation that must be configured in order for this budget warning to go to the delegate. Additional information will be provided in the regular monthly newsletter.
6. DESIGNEES – Not Workflow related but an important communication.
Many faculty members have a Designee worktag that is used to allocate individual faculty funds to them. In some cases, these funds come from a different cost center than the one the faculty member resides in. This made it impossible for the faculty member’s administrative assistant to see these allocated funds in their budget to actual reports.
We have now made an enhancement to Workday to assign Administrative Assistants the role of Designee Financial Analyst so that those allocated funds now are viewable by the cost center AA for any faculty in their cost center.
If you know of budget allocated to a designee that you don’t see but you think you should, please reach out to Kim Savinelli.
If you have a Tip or Trick you would like to share in the next newsletter please email finance@wesleyan.edu.