Report How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

2 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Transforming Finance with Speed, Precision, and Insight 3

Finance Operations Driven by Agentic AI from Workday: Core Processes, Intelligently Automated 4

1. Intelligent Data Core 4

2. Streamline and Simplify the Close Process 5

3. AI-Driven Bank Reconciliation at Your Fingertips 6

4. Invoice Processing That Works for You 6

5. Match Payments in Moments 7

6. Simplify the Collection Letter Process 7

Smart Spending Starts Here 7

1. Simplify the Spend Process 7

2. Accelerate Expense Approval and Reduce Risk 8

3. From Receipt to Reimbursement 9

Dynamic Financial Planning 9

1. Catch Planning Errors Before They Happen 9

2. Ask Questions, Get Insights 10

Why Workday? 10

3 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

Introduction. As finance and accounting evolve, CAOs have shifted their focus to strategic leadership, data management, and cross-functional collaboration, and they’re leveraging AI and more to help their teams better support the business.

We believe organizations that embrace AI can automate the work that slows them down—including up to 90% of transaction processing—to speed up financial close and planning by 15 times, and enable teams to spend more time guiding the business.

Transforming finance with speed, precision, and insight. Finance teams continuously look for ways to streamline processes and improve decision-making. Through enhanced automation, a new level of controls and governance, and data-driven insights, organizations can now achieve unprecedented levels of speed and accuracy. These improvements in efficiency free up finance professionals to focus on high-level priorities: developing business insights, strengthening stakeholder relationships, and driving value-adding initiatives.

Superintelligence for finance. Financial management agents transform work.

50%+ ability to automate accounts payable

80% estimated

time savings on audit requests

35% improved

time-to-billing readiness

reduction in errors when customer

contracts are created

60%

Key benefits for finance teams: • Access rich contextual insight to drive faster, better decisions: Granular insight provides

the necessary foundation for AI to learn from and make recommendations. This, coupled with conversational experiences, allows finance to gain accurate business insights and make confident choices.

• Gain exponential productivity: With an intelligent data core as the foundation, we can put AI agents to work and transform the way work gets done. Concepts such as document-driven accounting become possible and eliminate unnecessary manual work. Critical processes move faster and backlogs shrink. Teams spend less time managing transactions and more time on strategic work.

• Set a new level of controls and governance: AI operates within Workday’s secure, governed foundation to detect patterns and anomalies. This surfaces errors across data and processes as they occur and recommends remediation strategies, mitigating risk and elevating data and process integrity.

https://www.workday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.html?tab=Agentic-Finance#agents https://www.workday.com/en-us/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents.html?tab=Agentic-Finance#agents

4 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

Finance operations driven by agentic AI from Workday: Core processes, intelligently automated. 1. Intelligent data core. From the start, Workday was built to deepen financial insight—not strip it away like many legacy accounting systems. Instead of discarding detail, we retain the rich contextual data that comes with each transaction, such as a supplier or customer invoice: location, region, project, supervisor, campaign, and cost center. This level of detail makes financial reporting in Workday more accurate, meaningful, and actionable. And when new dimensions are needed, they’re easy to configure. No rigid accounting code block required.

In addition, Workday Accounting Center allows customers to integrate third‑party data—such as revenue and expense system data—and bring it into Workday with its full operational context. Because we know our customers need more context, not less, we preserve all the dimensionality of that data as well.

For example, a restaurant can integrate point‑of‑sale data into Workday, combining the latest sales information with details such as meal items, beverages, merchandise, restaurant location, and even the server. Workday then automatically transforms this operational data into detailed accounting entries, summarizes them, and posts them to the general ledger—without slowing down processing. In fact, it speeds it up and consolidates everything into a unified platform for all your accounting.

What’s more, the accounting rules that drive this are fully configurable by finance and are auditable end‑to‑end.

What makes this even more powerful is the ability to apply AI to this rich data foundation with the Financial Analysis Agent. Customers can ask natural language questions and get answers in a conversational experience, and even automatically generate narrative explanations of the numbers to easily share those insights with the rest of the business.

69% increase in time spent on strategic work by accounting teams

5 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

2. Streamline and simplify the close process. Workday creates continuous, real-time accounting—as transactions are approved, the secure platform automatically generates accounting entries, handles intercompany eliminations, and manages translations. With native reporting, teams have instant access to this information.

Unlike legacy systems that require moving and manipulating data, Workday preserves full operational context and data lineage. Workday captures the entire thread of data from the originating purchase order to the resulting journal entry. This context provides a level of granularity that improves explainability and accelerates exception resolution and root cause analysis. This unbroken lineage to the source transaction ensures accurate and continuous reconciliation because it lives directly within your general ledger.

In addition, we have built AI data and process controls into Workday, which sets a new standard for governance. Made possible thanks to the Financial Test Suite, a Financial Test Agent interrogates data and business processes for risk and potential fraud, and recommends the best course of remediation. This happens continuously throughout the financial reporting period so issues are caught well ahead of the close. In addition, a Financial Audit Agent allows accounting to use a conversational experience to request a sample dataset that proves the completeness of the accounting team’s data and processes, automating audit evidence collection.

6 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

3. AI-driven bank reconciliation at your fingertips. A timely and complete bank reconciliation process is a vital control for any organization. Workday executes complex bank reconciliation to ensure that the majority of bank statement lines are automatically reconciled based on customer-defined matching rules.

Workday AI Matching for Bank Reconciliation helps streamline the bank reconciliation process further by leveraging predictive matching for bank statement lines. AI will analyze historical data and patterns, predicting potential matches for unreconciled lines, eliminating manual reconciliations, and improving speed and accuracy.

4. Invoice processing that works for you.

Before After Impact

Managing AP invoices requires substantial time for repetitive manual tasks, leaving little time for analysis.

Workday Supplier Invoice Automation uploads and scans invoices in bulk, identifies urgency, and routes to the right specialists based on past assignments.

• Dramatic increase in AP processing capacity

• True touchless processing from receipt to payment

• Reduced time and costs from processing errors

AP inboxes require substantial time dedicated to repetitive manual tasks.

Auditoria.AI Smartbots handle common AP requests and inquiries, while AP Accruals Smartbots automate the entire accrual process.

• Streamlined email handling

• Automated data gathering

• Faster month-end close through automated journal entries

AP users must manually analyze various tax attributes to find appropriate codes, rates, and recoverability—risking inaccurate tax compliance.

AI suggests necessary tax attributes based on historical data and parameters from header, line, and business entity levels.

• Eliminated manual tax analysis

• Improved tax compliance

• Automated attribute recommendations based on multiple data points

7 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

5. Match payments in moments. For contract-to-cash processes, AI-powered payment matching creates direct connections between incoming funds and customer invoices. When exceptions occur, Workday provides specific recommendations. This precision increases the speed of cash application and creates more accurate records, saving hours in follow-up calls with customers.

Furthermore, in an AI environment, the matching process improves over time, enabling a faster process with each iteration. Leveraging AI has a direct impact on cash forecasting, and Workday customers have seen as much as a 50% reduction in time spent on manual cash application.

6. Simplify the collection letter process. Many organizations use templatized collection letters, but there’s still a lot of back and forth. Customers can leverage AI to create tailored messages with specifics, including dates, invoice numbers, and days past due.

The tone can be easily adjusted to scale back severity. AI significantly reduces the manual effort often required to produce these customized emails for customers, from an average of 30 minutes to 5 minutes.

Smart spending starts here. Active monitoring and intelligent automation help finance and procurement teams maintain control over organizational spending.

1. Simplify the spend process. In the source‑to‑pay process, AI helps guide users through optimized purchasing. Intelligent intake streamlines user requests and routing while ensuring compliant buying paths, and the Contract Negotiation Agent helps optimize terms and reduce contractual risk.

8 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

2. Accelerate expense approval and reduce risk. Expense report review can be tedious, time‑consuming, and error‑prone—whether teams review every submission or rely on selective criteria. Expense Protect in Workday uses AI to analyze expenses in context, reducing the burden of manual approvals while helping teams maintain control and minimize fraud. The platform evaluates both business context and payee data for each submission, then surfaces clear risk insights for human review and final decisions.

Workday automatically assigns risk levels (high, medium, or low) to expenses and highlights what is driving that classification, such as duplicate submissions or amount anomalies. These assessments are visible in both the expense approval inbox and the expense report work area, giving approvers one place to focus on the items that matter most. Teams can configure these risk levels to drive automation—for example, fast‑tracking low‑risk, policy‑compliant expenses and adding extra scrutiny for high‑risk items.

Organizations such as Veolia have used Workday Expenses to streamline validation and approval, simplify compliance with approved procedures, and strengthen control over employee spend.

The expense report work area then provides a consolidated view of all expenses needing attention. Approvers gain real‑time visibility into where spend is going, which reports are blocked, and which risks require action—speeding up the approval process, strengthening compliance, and helping employees get reimbursed faster while approvers spend less time reviewing.

https://www.workday.com/en-us/customer-stories/q-z/veolia-streamlined-process-expenses-improves-efficiencies.html

9 How Workday Is Redefining Finance with AI

3. From receipt to reimbursement. On the expense‑to‑reimburse process, Workday can automatically scan and digitize receipts in the employee’s regular workspace—such as Slack or Microsoft Teams—and turn them into itemized expenses, grouped by trip or category, with key fields pre‑populated. Workday then automatically drafts expense reports that employees simply review and submit, rather than building them from scratch. On the approval side, the platform raises alerts when specific transactions or categories appear anomalous or out of range, helping prevent financial loss before reimbursement.

Customers such as SRS Distribution have capped expense cycles at seven days and reclaimed thousands of hours each year that were previously lost to manual T&E firefighting. By automating the journey from receipt capture through automatic report drafting to reimbursement, Workday enables both employees and managers to focus more time on strategic work instead of chasing receipts and correcting reports.

Dynamic financial planning.

Workday customers report up to 34% increase in FP&A’s time spent on strategic work.

1. Catch planning errors before they happen. Workday uses anomaly detection to catch potential errors in sheets for plan data (for budgets, forecasts, and scenarios) entered manually or through automated imports. It compares actual past data to detect anomalies, and alerts finance and operational planning users of possible errors or inputs not reflective of seasonality. Users can improve the accuracy of Workday by accepting or rejecting these anomaly alerts. The model learns from this feedback and continuously refines its ability to detect true anomalies.

Using Predictive Forecaster, the platform compares a forecast driven by machine learning with one created by a planner to identify accounts with significant differences. Teams can quickly spot potential data errors through real-time analytics. This immediate visibility of outliers leads to higher accuracy.

https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/case-studies/srs-distribution-customer-case-study.pdf

2. Ask questions, get insights. The next evolution for FP&A is to use a more human-centered, conversational approach to interrogating numbers, asking questions to deliver a streamlined user experience. Users can surface trusted data quickly, uncover contextually relevant insights, and get recommended actions through simple questions or queries.

These new Gen AI capabilities enable faster access to data, more relevant insights, and clearer recommendations for action, all using conversational text to navigate the platform. By simplifying the process of finding and analyzing data in Workday Adaptive Planning, users can make quicker, more strategic decisions about their businesses.

Why Workday? Workday Agentic Finance delivers superintelligence for work that improves many aspects of financial operations.

Workday’s trusted data foundation revolutionizes how work gets done. Ensuring secure, high-quality data across all products, Agentic Finance delivers confidence, efficiency, and business value at scale. Fueled by more than 800 billion transactions a year, Agentic Finance understands the context behind each process. And Workday’s responsible AI practices prioritize transparency and control, with clear visibility into how AI models operate and make recommendations.

Agentic Finance from Workday.

• Automate complex workflows.

• Process transactions faster.

• Reduce compliance risk.

• Catch anomalies automatically.

• Generate accurate forecasts.

• Enhance rather than replace human judgment.

• Maintain control over AI recommendations.

• Focus expertise on strategic decisions and complex analysis.

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Introduction What the research tells us. Conclusion