Setup Considerations: Allocations
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of allocations. 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
Allocations is a financial process that enables you to:
- Distribute ledger activity from 1 organization to another.
- Assign costs within the same company or across companies.
When you process allocations, Workday creates operational journals to record the allocations on the ledgers.
Business Benefits
You can:
- Maintain more flexibility and greater control over accounting results.
- Perform complex allocations automatically by defining arithmetic calculations, reducing time and manual effort.
- Apply reusable filter conditions to your source or basis ledger transactions, to improve configuration and allocation performance.
Use Cases
An account manager or financial analyst can:
- Distribute IT costs over all cost centers based on headcount.
- Group allocations by worktag, reducing the number of allocation definitions you need to configure. This saves you time when you manage large amounts of data during close.
- Allocate marketing expenses to regions based on revenue per region.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
What can you do in Workday if your basis, such as headcount, is a statistic? | Create a statistic definition so you don't have to create 1 retrospectively when you're creating your allocation definition. |
What kinds of sources do you have? Are there any you want to exclude from the allocations? | You can filter your allocation definitions so that you only include the sources and basis that you need. You can specify:
|
What kind of basis types do you have? | You can calculate proration for:
|
How do you manage cancelled operational journals? | Workday doesn't create reversals for cancelled allocations, even when your tenant is configured to create reversals for cancelled operational journals. When you repost a cancelled allocation, Workday generates new journal line IDs for the journal.
If your use case relies on reposted operational journals having the same journal IDs as the original journal, you might need to manually adjust your accounting or otherwise account for allocations that were finalized and then rerun. Example: If you have an Accounting Center process that ingests journal lines and uses the journal line IDs to exclude duplicates, the process will not identify reposted allocation journals as duplicates because the journal line IDs have changed. |
How do alternate ledger currencies affect allocations? | When you run an allocation for a company that has an alternate ledger currency configured, Workday creates either a single-source allocation or a multisource allocation.
Workday generates different accounting for each type of allocation. The configuration of the allocation definition determines which type is created. |
How does segmented security on ledger accounts affect allocations? | Users can run allocations and view allocation results for ledger accounts that they don't have access to through segmented security. However, they can't view journal lines for those ledger accounts. |
Recommendations
To process allocations faster:
- Create a statistics definition with a value of 100% and use that as your basis so that Workday can bypass searching every combination of ledger account.
- Display no more than 50,000 result lines to reduce the number of allocation calculations.
- Map only the worktags that you need to the target and offset to save yourself manual effort, in addition to reducing processing time.
Requirements
If you want to select a:
- Headcount basis type, create a headcount definition.
- Fixed percent pro rata basis type, create a statistic definition with a statistic type ofPercent.
Limitations
You can only:
- Allocate from budget plan structures when the budgets are approved and no longer in a draft state.
- View up to 10,000 lines on a statistic without needing to export it.
- Configure up to 53 allocation downstream dependencies when you schedule or mass finalize allocations unless you configure group sets to be dependent on each other.
Tenant Setup
You can group allocations by the fiscal periods on budget dates.
Security
In the Financial Accounting functional area:
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Process: Allocations
| Users can process allocations. |
Set Up: Allocations
| Users can create allocation definitions that specify the:
|
Business Processes
Business Process | Considerations |
|---|---|
Allocation Run Event in the Financial Accounting functional area. | Enables you to run allocations across a company. Workday sets the allocation status to Pro Forma .
For allocations that result in a journal, the event also creates a pro forma journal. |
Allocation Run Intercompany Event in the Financial Accounting functional area. | Enables you to run allocations across multiple companies. The event creates a pro forma intercompany journal for each company. |
Budget Amendment Event and its security policy in the Budgets functional area. | Enables you to create draft budget amendments for allocations. |
Reporting
- TheFind Allocationsreport displays allocation results.
- TheAllocation Work Areareport provides detailed information for month end processing.
Integrations
Web Services | Considerations |
|---|---|
Get Allocation Definitions
Get Allocation Group Sets | Enables you to fetch allocation definitions or allocation group sets. |
Get Financial Condition Rules
| Retrieves existing financial condition rules. |
Put Allocation Definition
Put Allocation Group Set | You can:
|
Put Financial Condition Rule
| You can:
|
Connections and Touchpoints
Workday amends your budgets to reflect your allocations.
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.