Overview
This article covers some of the basic finance terminology used in Workday.
Details / Instructions
- Actuals - Recorded revenue and expenditure transactions.
- Budget Amendment - A change to a budget allocation made within a fiscal year.
- Budget Checking - A step in financial business processes to ensure there is enough budget available in the selected funding source to support the transaction.
- Budget Structure - Indicates the type of budget. Examples include: Operating Budget, Control Budget, Position Budget, Grant Budget, and Gift Budget.
- Budget Template - Ties a budget structure to a company and fiscal year. Example: FY24 Operating Budget.
- Commitments - Pre-encumbrances to hold funds for a specific purpose.
- Cost Center -Represents an area/unit of financial responsibility and management. Cost center is not necessarily tied to departments or HR reporting hierarchies.
- Driver Tag - A worktag that, when selected, defaults other fields in a transaction. A driver tag is required for all fiscal transactions.
- Endowment - An invested fund that annually distributes some amount of support for operations while protecting the corpus for future generations. Many details and policies relating to endowments can be found in the UR Policy Library.
- Fiscal Year - Annual financial timeframe.
- Foundation Data Model (FDM) - The data framework that supports financial transaction processing, enriched reporting and security within Workday. It is similar in nature to a chart of accounts in legacy systems.
- Fund - Used to group related activities for financial statement and budget management purposes. Always default from other worktags.
- Gift - Represents both current use gifts and endowments.
- Internal Grants- Formerly referred to as faculty development accounts, internal grants shall only consist of only research incentives and start-up funding. These funds will expire upon the faculty member’s departure from the University. For all other faculty needs, the school’s base budget and/or restricted funding should be the source of fiscal support.
- Ledger Account - Used to classify revenue and expenses for financial reporting. These default in based on selected spend or revenue categories. Operating budgets are maintained at the ledger account level.
- Obligations - Contractual obligations to pay a supplier; Encumbrances.
- Original Budget - Allocations made at the start of a fiscal year.
- Period - Monthly financial timeframe. Period 1 = July.
- Position Control - All full time and permanent part time positions should be one to one, position to person; positions are funded each year at actual or expect cost; labor budgets do not carry forward into future years; all (non-emergency) new positions come though the annual budget process; any emergency requests to create a position midyear must be approved by the Chief Operating Officer or Provost and the Chief Human Resources Officer.
- Program - Used to classify operating expenses for financial statement reporting. Always defaults from other worktags.
- Project - Organization used to capture the life-to-date revenue, expenses, and transfers of a capital project or certain educational projects. Educational projects are created for external reporting purposes and include sports camps and student projects where a company was formed. Has a start and end date and allows life-to-date reporting.
- Related Tag - Auto-populated based on selected driver worktags.
- Reserves - Deans and Vice Presidents will have access to additional funding, generally referred to reserves, for unplanned expenses or pilot programming that will cause them to exceed their total budget. Reserves are accumulated from savings in non-labor operating lines. Total reserve balances cannot exceed to the Dean or Vice President’s total, non-labor operating budget. Reserve balances will not live in Workday; they will be tracked independently by the Office of Planning and Budget (OPB).
- Revenue Category - Worktag used to provide insight into the University’s revenue. Required for all revenue transactions and journal entries. Related ledger accounts will default.
- Spend Category - Worktag used to provide insight into the University’s expenses. Required for all expense transactions. Will cause ledger accounts to default.
- Temporary Budget Amendment - A budget amendment that only impacts the current fiscal year budgets.
- Worktag - Identifier used to describe and categorize transactions in Workday.
See Also
Workday Finance Roles