TaxAct – Transition to Workday Financials
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About the Client |
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Industry Software as a Service |
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Employees >300 |
TaxAct is a leader in the tax preparation industry, focused on providing affordable solutions for electronically filing taxes. Since its founding in 1998, TaxAct has e-filed more than 90 million tax returns and was the first to provide free filing services. TaxAct was historically operated within a larger corporate framework alongside another entity.
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The Challenge |
Before partnering with Kognitiv, TaxAct operated within a larger corporate framework alongside other entities, all utilizing Workday Financials. Following separation from the parent structure, TaxAct aimed to continue using Workday Financials with their historical data, replicating the existing configuration from the parent tenant.
During this process, TaxAct faced the challenge of converting seven years of GL data at the transaction level while preserving original support attachments from the parent tenant and attaching them to data conversion entries in their new tenant. Proposed solutions included leveraging Prism or creating a separate data repository/SFTP site organized by reference number for each conversion journal.
These approaches to data conversion posed several challenges for go-live:
Volume
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Source of
Attachment
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Intercompany
Affiliates
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Data Conversion
Challenges
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The Solution |
TaxAct leveraged Kognitiv’s support to develop a solution for historic data conversion and attachment extraction. With a clear goal to ensure that users could easily drill into transactions and locate attachments as if they had originally been posted in the new Workday tenant, without summarizations or external links. This project required a unique and complex workflow to achieve the desired results:
GL Data Extract:
- This allowed normalizing data for changes, like REFID differences.
- Starting with the earliest period’s beginning balances and working forward, GL data could be tied out to historical financial statements.
- We leveraged reversing journal functionality in Workday, so reversal entries could be linked to their source transactions (and relevant attachments.)
Attachment Data Extract:
GL and Attachment Data Load:
Validation:
Rounds of Testing:
The following workflow was executed to achieve the desired results:
“Very thankful for the innovative minds at Kognitiv for our Workday Financial Implementation. They stepped in and saved the day for our implementation to go live without delays. They were able to bring automation to load years of historical data accurately, with attachments at a critical time in our project … We are grateful for your amazing skills, hard work, and dedication with our Workday Implementation.”
Julie Scroggins, Workday System Administrator
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The Impact |
TaxAct engaged Kognitiv for these efforts a few months before the planned go-live date, and the project successfully went live on time. All seven years of detailed financial data are available in the new Workday tenant as Conversion journals, with attachments, as if they were posted there originally, with no need for an external data repository for attachments.
