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Defining Operational Journals in Error & How We Help You Resolve Them

Defining Operational Journals in Error & How We Help You Resolve Them

Do You Deal With Operational Journals in Error?

Is your Workday tenant free of operational journals in error? Believe it or not, some Workday customers are not aware that there is a task that Workday provides to help identify these errors during your closing process. You may find some journals in error lurking in the background on your Commitment and Obligation ledgers. Some customers may have thousands of these in errors and have found it to be too time consuming of a manual process to clear. Instead, they are ignored and left in error because they were not affecting their actual ledgers and passing a false budget check on spend transactions.

This is important if you have turned on or plan to start using the following features:

  1. Budget Check for procurement, expense reports and spend authorization transactions.
  2. Workday’s budgetary reporting for commitment and obligation against actuals for available balances.
  3. Budgetary control options and rules for better oversight of spend control.

We Have The Solution to Eliminate These Errors

Workday provides the task “Fix Operational Journals in Error” to identify these errors. Depending on the task parameters you supply, this may take a few minutes to run. Once you run this task, Workday returns a maximum of 500 journals at a time to clear. This is a useful tool to run if there are a handful of errors, however, if the journals in error have been accumulating over time into the tens or hundreds of thousands, you will need to run the task repeatedly until all journals are cleared. This is a time consuming and ultimately futile procedure.

We discovered this issue when a client wanted to uptake the budget check process and their commitment and obligation ledgers were not in balance due to the journals in error. This also caused a false pass during budget check since the ledgers were out of balance. This client was forced to ignore journals in error due to the manual effort to clear the journals and abandon the budget check process. Additionally, in order to manage spend, an extra step was added to the process for the managers and finance team. It manually validates the spend against the budget for spend control instead of being able to use Workday’s functionality.

Efficient Automation That Saves You Time

Due to the limitations for clearing the operational journals manually, this endeavor called for automation. With the help from our integrations team, we now have a more efficient way to clear over 500 journals in error, even over 100,000 with a push of a button! For this client, we used a tool to create a “bot” that would utilize the user’s credentials to log into Workday, then run this report continuously in the background until all journals are cleared. It is safe to say, this automation saved our client from being away from their duties for 2 days or 10 consecutive hours of performing the same task repeatedly, with no breaks and now they can effectively use the Budget check options in Workday.

In Summary…there was a problem and we fixed it.

The bot we created will solve all your worldly problems.

Just kidding, it won’t, but in today’s world everyone is focused on being more efficient and saving time through automation, and this is a solution where applied automation will save you hours over hours if you have a lot of journals in error.

Author

  • Kognitiv Inc.

    The founders and consultants of Kognitiv live and breathe Workday. We understand that going live with your new system is just the first step in a long partnership with Workday and its ecosystem.