Enforcing Expense Reimbursement Policies in Workday

Managing employee expenses can be challenging, especially when trying to balance policy compliance, fraud prevention, and process efficiency. Workday® provides functionality to ensure your organization stays on track while saving valuable time. This blog serves as a walkthrough of different tools that can make this less of a burden!

Expense Items, Groups, etc.

Expense Items represent the individual expenses users can claim (e.g., meals, lodging, or mileage). In the realm of Expense Item configuration, there’s a whole host of functionality that can aid in placing restrictions and adding to enforcement:

Expense Policy Group

• Ability to use security segments to hide or allow visibility into specific populations.

Expense Item Group

• Subcategorization of Expense Items for selection.

Allowance Plans

• Ability to set up compensation allowances as part of an employee’s regular pay (e.g., cell phone allowance).

Rate Tables, Per Diem, Travel Journals, etc.

• Ability to identify specific rates (per day, per mile, etc.) and accommodate multi-day trips.

Travel Master Data (Cities, Airlines, Hotels, Rental Agencies, etc.)

• Can be used to drive preferred vendors

Expense Item configuration will allow administrators to specify what can be selected (or seen) by users. This is an important aspect of controlling what transactions can be submitted by employees and should serve as the first step in administering the tenant configuration.

Create Expense Item

Business Process

Using the Workday Business Process framework, we can depend on existing tools to place guardrails on transactions and route for approvals. Here’s how you can use these tools to ensure the right path for your organization’s expense reports.

Spend Instructions

• Placement of organization’s expense policies, communication of important information, and sharing tips & tricks.

Custom Validations and Step Validations

• Application of condition rules to prohibit transactions or ensure they meet certain attributes.

Routing

• Directing transactions to the appropriate approver/reviewer for authorization.

• You can even route every X number of expense reports for special audit/review.

Questionnaires

• Using Questionnaires to validate/route based on responses.

Alerts and Notifications

• Exception-based or reminder notifications targeting specific individuals or subsets.

Leveraging these business process configuration options will assist the organization in providing self-help instructions, data validation, ensuring transactions are sent to the right place for review and approval, and even the ability to set up automated communications when events arise.

Expense Report

Reporting

Ensuring that the organization’s configuration matches the policies set forth and that transactions are following the expected paths can be monitored with manual and automated means. This may include:

Delivered reports

• Reports like Expense Audit Work Area provide an easy way to review discrepancies or transactions that stick out.

Custom reports

• Reports crafted to find exceptions or ensure that all transactions meet the standards.

Dashboards or Expenses Hub

• Placement of reporting (and tasks) in front of the user, managers, or administrators for easy access and review.

Expense Audit Work Area

Expense Protect

Designed to enhance expense management by embedding intelligent policy enforcement and fraud detection directly into the workflow. Once trained (requires 2-4 weeks), it ensures compliance by automatically validating expenses against organizational policies in real time, flagging anomalies like duplicate claims, missing receipts, or spending over approved limits.

With configurable risk levels and actionable insights, Expense Protect streamlines approvals, reduces risks, and provides comprehensive oversight for effective and efficient expense management.

Conclusion

Workday offers a robust suite of tools to enforce expense policies effectively, ensuring compliance, reducing errors, and enhancing efficiency. Features like automated policy checks, configurable rules, real-time validations, and fraud detection through tools like Expense Protect seamlessly integrate into the expense workflow.

Combined with powerful reporting, dashboards, and approval workflows, Workday provides organizations with the flexibility and control needed to manage expenses proactively and maintain accountability, all while empowering employees to adhere to clear and consistent policies.

Thanks for reading!

Eamon from Minnesota