How Workday Prism Analytics Offer Unmatched Insight in Workday Financial Management

 

01.05.2023 | Managed Services, Technical Articles

 

The days of simply managing core accounting are over. Every business function needs to provide value that expands margins, accelerates growth, and overcomes challenges hindering the larger organization. Solutions like Workday Financial Management have provided enterprises with a scalable platform that integrates with the larger ecosystem of tools and technology to empower everyone from the CFO down to entry-level accountants to contribute to profitability and performance.

While Workday Financial Accounting has some capacity to offer contextual financial insights for the organization, there’s an opportunity to take business intelligence to the next level. Enter Workday Prism analytics.

This tool allows you to elevate what you’re doing beyond transactional reporting and elementary data visualization to make a data hub that can ingest information from disparate and even external sources. As a result, you can manage and unlock the insight from your financial data and reports in one consolidated place. Here’s what you need to know:

Accessible External Data

Until more recently, data analysis within Workday has been mostly limited to the data contained within the system. This enterprise cloud platform provides a diverse array of functionality, but there are still data sources that either fall outside of Workday’s bill of fare or are not contained within an organization’s current suite of solutions. Just like the inclusion of Extend in their suite of products, Workday added Prism to widen the decision-making capacity and performance of leaders and everyday end users.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you are a mortgage company and have a high volume of data to process, both from inside and outside the organization, as well as reports to submit under the FHA, the ECOA, and other regulations. The ability to track profitability or pinpoint issues with performance not only hinges upon how well your company would leverage Workday data, but whether you’d be able to pull from a variety of other sources and systems.

In fact, a mortgage company that integrates Workday Prism into their tech stack has the potential to enhance the loan procurement process. With a data hub at the center of their Financial Management operations, they can streamline their requisitions for government-mandated documents and automate rule-driven workflows to load incoming data for reporting.

Whether financial considerations are central to your business or an ancillary concern, there are plenty of benefits which can improve operations, reduce costs, and boost revenue.

Seamless HCM Integration

Though the human resources and finance arms of many organizations are often speaking in different languages, the ability of Workday HCM and Financial Management to integrate allows them to find some common ground. Add the functionality of Workday Prism, and both halves of the conversation have access to a centralized data hub.

One way this can positively impact organizations on the financial side is by creating data breadcrumbs which allow them to trace the spending of individual leaders or employees. By creating user-friendly visualizations of these financial reports, organizations can better identify opportunities to curb spending or measure the return on investment of expenditures. Since all the data can be contained in multilayered repositories, you can still control who sees what.

This is just one of the benefits of the cross-module Workday integration for Prism. All the disparate sources which can be brought together within this data nerve center can amplify the accuracy and capacity of analytics. This is especially the case when assets within HCM and Financial Management are cross-compared with data from other valuable external sources.

Heightened Security

Workday’s business is driven by trust, not only to ensure your data and insight are accurate beyond a doubt, but to always protect your sensitive information. By using Prism, everything from the Financial Module application to Workday’s infrastructure is organized, architected, and monitored with best-in-class security policies in mind.

Rather than exporting Workday data into an unsecured third-party system, you can conduct comprehensive reporting using the benefit of their security approach. Prism even can act as a protected archival tool for organizations by enabling them to report on historical data (payroll, journal entries, supplier invoices, etc.) using the Workday security model. 

Moreover, every attribute of HR and Financial data is encrypted before each data visualization session users conduct within their Workday tenant. Add 24/7 monitoring, single-sign-on support, and the ability of a company’s security administrators to control data usage and action performance makes Prism data transformation extra secure.

Simplified Process & Analytics

The ability to streamline the accounting process and improve reporting insights has been kicked up a notch thanks to Workday Prism Analytics. It’s the groundwork for Accounting Center, which gives organizations better positioning to ingest and transform information surrounding business events into detailed and actionable data entries.

Accounting Center enables organizations to generate financial reports using attributes that are not available in Workday’s foundation data model (FDM). The Prism bedrock allows your finance function to import high volumes of third-party data and create a clear data lineage for visibility into the behind-the-scenes action that shapes insights.

Moreover, Workday Prism allows organizations to unlock additional components of Workday Discovery Boards. With both tools in place, you can leverage Spend Actuals, which empowers the financial side of your business to visual actual spend from multiple spend sources, unifying data from Workday and third-party sources.

Unlocking the Full Potential of Workday Prism Analytics

The potential to deepen your insight beyond what the normal Workday user can achieve makes this data hub even more of a value generator for the financial side of the business. However, the process of taking Prism from scope exploration and delivery to launch and support has plenty of impediments along the way for those new to this aspect of this enterprise management cloud.

Working with the right partner can help you avoid some of the most common Workday implementation failures. If you choose Agilysis, you receive the benefit of our seasoned consultants as well as our extensive track record of success. With the right guidance, your organization can unlock the full potential of data analysis with the ease of Workday at your fingertips.

Ready to enhance your financial management with Workday Prism analytics? Learn about how Agilysis can maximize your results.

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