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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Central Travel Cards

Setup Considerations: Central Travel Cards

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of a central travel card program. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

The central travel card program consolidates air travel spend on a single central travel card, also know as a ghost card, for individual organizations instead of individual workers. When you import central travel card transactions for air travel expenditure into Workday, Workday automatically assigns transactions to workers for them to include on expense reports.

Business Benefits

Central travel cards enable you to:
  • Consolidate air travel and expense spend for your company.
  • Have an accurate view of the air travel spend for your company.
  • Track and analyze air travel spend for your company effectively.
  • Improve travel policy decisions and negotiate better travel rates, optimizing your cash flow.
  • Reduce financial risk by hiding the central card number from employees.
  • Reduce expense creation and manual entry effort when you import central travel card transactions through a credit card integration.
  • Prevent employees from charging large business expenses on personal credit cards.

Use Cases

When you configure central travel card functionality:
  • Expense payees can submit expenses from corporate cards and central travel cards in a single expense report.
  • Cost-center managers and travel managers can view all air travel spend in 1 place, improving spend analysis.
  • Organizations can assign a dedicated Custodian to manage unassigned transactions and assign them to the correct expense payee.

Question to Consider

How do you create central travel cards?
To minimize data errors, you can create central travel cards manually before transaction file load for:
  • AMEX.
  • Mastercard.
  • Visa.

Recommendations

  • Create central travel cards before loading transactions files to prevent data load errors and eliminate manual workarounds.
  • Create a secured token for the unmasked central travel card number to ensure cards that you create manually have a secured credit card number.
  • Configure custom alerts for the Custodians to help identify and assign unassigned central travel card transactions so workers can include them on expense reports.

Requirements

To import Visa and Mastercard central travel cards transactions, work with your:
  • Credit card network and financial institution to include central travel card transactions on your VCF4 or CDF3 integration file.
  • Travel agency to ensure that a unique identifier for expense payees is included on the integration files, such as
    Employee ID
    . Workday uses the unique identifier to assign central travel card transactions to the expense payee.
To import AMEX central travel card transactions:
  • Identify which integration file input to use for the central travel card based on the region. For US and Canada, request a
    Workday AMEX Central Travel Data File
     in a tab delimited format text file. For EMEA region, request an AMEX
    Global TMKD File
     in a fixed length format text file for Option D.
  • Work with your AMEX Account Manager to request a Technology Enablement Engagement ticket in order to request the central travel data file.
  • Work with your travel agencies to include a unique identifier in the integration file. Example: The
    REF_5
     field on
    Global TMKD File
     and the
    Workday Employee ID
     field on
    Workday AMEX Central Travel Data File
    .
  • Create the AMEX central travel cards manually in Workday.

Limitations

Workday only automatically assigns airfare central travel card transactions to employees. For central travel card purchases such as hotel and booking fees, you must assign the transactions manually. Currently, Workday doesn't support receiving the unique identifiers for transactions other than airfare.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domain
Considerations
Organization: Manage Central Travel Card Transactions
 in the Expenses functional area.
Users, such as Custodians, can manage central travel card transactions for the organizations configured on the corporate credit card billing account.
Set Up: Credit Card
 in the Common Financial Management functional area.
Users can create and manage credit cards for their company.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Reports or Dashboards
Considerations
Find Credit Card Transaction Files
Use this report to identify errors that occur during the file load.
Find Credit Card Transactions
View a list of credit card transactions, including central travel card transactions to analyze worker spend.
Find Credit Cards
Find credit cards you create manually or through the integration. View details on employee credit card accounts, including central travel cards.
Find Unassigned Central Travel Card Transactions
View all unassigned central travel card transactions for your organization and assign them to the correct expense payee to include on an expense report.

Integrations

You can configure your integrations to import and automatically assign central travel cards to workers for expense inclusion.
Web Services
Considerations
Get Expense Credit Card Transactions
Import Credit Card Transactions
Use to load and retrieve credit card or central travel card transactions.
Assign Expense Central Travel Card Transaction
Use to assign central travel card transactions to expense payees.
Integration Templates
Considerations
Import AMEX Central Travel Data File (Masked)
Use these templates to import masked central travel card transactions from AMEX.
Import MasterCard CDF3File Masked
For Mastercard, use these templates to import masked:
  • Credit cards and transactions.
  • Central travel cards and transactions.
Import Visa VCF4 Scrubbed
For Visa, use these templates to import scrubbed:
  • Credit cards and transactions.
  • Central travel cards and transactions.

Connections and Touchpoints

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.