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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2024-04-19
Steps: Set Up Accounting Categories

Steps: Set Up Accounting Categories

You can logically group similar accounting objects for posting, searching, and reporting purposes. You can establish accounting categories for:
  • Business assets
  • Customers
  • Receivable write offs
  • Revenue
  • Spend
  • Suppliers
Workday requires that you assign a category to every customer, supplier, item, business asset, and writeoff.
  1. Create categories to classify the types of spend categories you want to report on. Examples: Assets, Expense Items.
  2. Access the
    Maintain Customer Categories
     task.
    Create categories to classify the types of customers you have. Examples: Hospitality, Technology.
    Security:
    Set Up: Customer Categories
     domain in the Common Financial Management functional area. See Steps: Set Up Security Permissions.
  3. Access the
    Maintain Supplier Categories
     task.
    Create categories to classify the types of supplies you want to account for. Examples: Office supplies, Utilities.
    Security:
    Set Up: Supplier Categories
     in the Common Financial Management functional area.See Steps: Set Up Security Permissions.
  4. Add categories to classify the types of revenue you need to track and report. Examples: Product Sales, Interest Income.
  5. Access the
    Maintain Receivable Write off Reasons
     task.
    Create reasons to describe the receivables you want to write off. Examples: Bad Debt, Standard Write off.
    Security:
    Set Up: Receivable Write-off Categories
     in the Common Financial Management functional area.
For all category types, you can use accounting categories to assign as characteristics to accounting objects and people. You can then:
  • Report on everything assigned to a specific category.
  • Route transactions to the appropriate ledger accounts by using categories as conditions in account posting rules.
  • Search for and find groups of objects or people according to a specific category.
For spend and revenue categories you can:
  • Use the categories as worktags. Example: When you create a journal, tag it with a spend or revenue category.
  • Write transactions against a category without having to specify items. Example: When you create an invoice, write a line and its amount to a general category instead of a specific item.