How Workday’s Innovative A.I. Helps ERPA’s Finance Team Succeed
At ERPA, we utilize Workday to run our organization just like our customers! And like our customers, we continue to increase our return on investment with Workday and increase our Finance and Accounting team’s efficiency by adopting Workday’s AI Illuminate capabilities. Below are some examples of how our Accounting and Finance teams are utilizing Illuminate features:
Journal Insights
Journal Insights is one of the first machine learning/AI features Workday released for Financials. Journal Insights utilizes machine learning to continuously monitor and analyze posted journal line data and highlights anomalies, such as missing or incorrect Worktags, for potential correction via a journal entry. Journal Insights even tees-up the correcting journal entry for users within the report. This has proved to be a nice value add for our Controller, who reviews Journal Insights each month as part of the close process.
Worktag Recommendations
Another feature that has been around for a few years now is Worktag Recommendations for Supplier Invoices. Worktag Recommendations uses machine learning from historical supplier invoice information to populate recommendations of up top 5 of the most likely worktags when supplier invoices or supplier invoice requests are created. At ERPA, our Accounts Payable team utilizes Workday’s recommendations specifically for Spend Categories and Cost Centers. This has helped lead to a reduction in miscategorized invoices.
Receipt Scanning and Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Expense Items
Workday’s Receipt Scanning feature, which utilizes optical character recognition to scan expense receipts and populate expense details like amount, currency, date, and merchant, has been available and utilized at ERPA for years. However, when we coupled that functionality with two more recent capabilities we’ve seen received remarkable feedback from our employees for the increased ease of use in creating expense reports. Those capabilities include creating a Workday-delivered expense receipt email inbox and turning on Intelligent Prompt Recommendations for Expense Items. Now, our employees can forward emailed receipts to our Workday delivered email address and Workday scans the receipt from there. Then, when available, Workday will recommend the expense item to use for that expense. For example, when an employee takes an Uber during a business trip, upon receiving the receipt email from Uber, the employee can simply forward that email to our Workday receipts email inbox and Workday creates a quick expense with the amount, date, merchant, and the recommended expense item already populated. Any time we can get back from creating expense reports is welcome!
Expense Protect
The last feature we’ll touch on is Expense Protect. Expense Protect is a machine-learning tool that analyzes each expense that is submitted in an expense report and assigns a risk score for each expense. The risk score is calculated by analyzing whether the expense is a potential duplicate, whether the amount of the expense is anomalous, or whether the expense might have an incorrect expense item. Our expense report approvers can view the risk scores for the expenses while reviewing the expense reports in their inboxes, which has provided another layer of verification for our managers and back office team.
What’s Next?
Like our customers, we’re continuing to evaluate Workday’s Illuminate solutions as they are being released and updating our own feature roadmap. Workday’s Supplier Invoice Scanning solution, which ingests and scans supplier invoices via a manual upload or through an AP email inbox, is one of those features that is on our roadmap. We have seen how our customers have been able to streamline their Accounts Payable processes further with this solution and look forward to reaping the benefits ourselves. We have also been testing Workday’s new GenAI-Power Collection Letter functionality, which was pushed to Production on July 11, 2025. That feature enables Workday customers to create and email personalized collection letters to customers by leveraging Generative AI and Workday Message Builder functionality. We have found this feature to be intuitive and a potential time-saver for our Collections team, so this will no-doubt be included on our roadmap as well.
