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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-09-18
Customer Invoice Narratives

Customer Invoice Narratives

Customer invoice narratives are rich-text explanatory or supporting comments that you can attach to customer invoices, customer invoice proposals, and customer invoice adjustments. Use narratives to explain to your customers what they are being charged for. Example:
This charge covers the specialized consulting performed in March.
Narrative lines can include rich text, dynamic text tags, and amounts that you compare to the net invoice amount.
You can also create invoice narrative templates, both in the Workday interface and through web services, that you can populate with invoice information that you plan to reuse.

Where you can use narratives

Document
How you access narratives
Customer invoice proposal
On either the
View Customer Invoice Proposal
 report or
Edit Customer Invoice Proposal
 task, select the
Invoice Narrative
 tab, and select
Add
or
Edit
.
Customer invoice
Use the
View Customer Invoice Narrative
 or
Add or Update Customer Invoice Narrative
 related actions.
Customer invoice adjustment
Same related actions as for customer invoices, but only adjustment-specific tags are available.

Dynamic Text Tags

In the rich text editor, click the tag icon to insert placeholders that resolve to live data when you save or apply the narrative. Dynamic tags resolve to header-level fields on the customer invoice document; they don’t pull values from individual invoice billing lines.
Tag groups include:
  • Invoice Fields by Category
    : Report fields, including Workday-delivered calculated fields, that relate to the Customer Invoice and Customer Invoice Adjustment business objects. To use these fields in invoice narratives, the authorized usage for the fields must be set to
    Default Areas
    .
  • Narrative Calculated Fields by Category
    : User-created calculated fields with authorized usage set to
    Invoice Narrative
    .
  • Invoice Custom Fields by Category
    : Fields at the invoice header level. The authorized usage for the fields must be set to
    Default Areas
    .
  • Global Dates
    : Curated, Workday-delivered global dates.
The tags available to apply depend on where you're editing the narrative: proposals and customer invoices show customer invoice fields only, while customer invoice adjustments show adjustment fields only.
You must have security access to a field to be able to use it as a tag.
When a tag doesn't have a value, it is omitted from the narrative.

Amount Matching

If you enter amounts on your narrative lines, the
Total Customer Invoice Narrative Amount
 field calculates the sum of those amounts. You can use this field to create custom validations that require the narrative total to match the
Net Invoice Amount
, preventing the invoice, invoice proposal, or invoice adjustment from being submitted if the amounts don't match.

Narrative Templates

You can create narrative templates when you plan to add similar text to many customer invoice documents. Then when you create or edit an invoice document, you can use the
Copy from Template
 option to copy narrative lines from one of your saved templates to replace or add to the current document's narrative:
  • Add Lines from Template
     (default): Appends template lines to existing lines.
  • Replace Any Existing Lines
    : Replaces all existing lines.
Add dynamic tags to your templates to enable you to customize each invoice document that uses that template.
Example: If you use the
Company
tag in a template, then whenever you copy that template to an invoice document, Workday replaces the
Company
tag with the actual company name for that invoice document.

Web Services for Narrative Templates

  • Use the
    Get Customer Invoice Narrative Templates
     and
    Put Customer Invoice Narrative Template
     web service operations within the
    Revenue Management (Public)
    and
    Financials Implementation Service
     web services to create and update invoice narrative templates.
  • The
    Put
    operation follows these behaviors:
    • Delete narrative lines that have the delete flag specified.
    • If the specified narrative line is found, update it.
    • If the specified narrative line is not found, create a new line.
    • Don't update narrative lines that aren't included in the web service request.
  • For the
    Put
    operation, we allow the dynamic tags for report fields, Workday-delivered calculated fields, customer-created calculated fields, custom fields, and a curated list of global dates. All of these conditions must be met:
    For report fields, Workday-delivered calculated fields, and custom fields:
    • The user must have security access to the field.
    • Authorized Usage for the field must be set to
      Default Areas
      .
    • The business object must be one of: Customer Invoice or Customer Invoice Adjustment.
    • The field must return a single value.
    • The specified Category can't be Awards or Students.
    For customer-created calculated fields:
    • The user must have security access to the field.
    • Authorized Usage for the field must be set to
      Invoice Narrative
      .
    • The business object must be one of: Customer Invoice or Customer Invoice Adjustment.
    • The field must return a single value.
    • The specified Category can't be Awards or Students.

Revising Narratives

On customer invoices and invoice adjustments, you can edit the invoice narrative at any time, unless the invoice or adjustment has canceled or terminated status.
On customer invoice proposals, you can't add or edit the invoice narrative when the proposal approval is in progress, unless you've added a review step to your
Customer Invoice Proposal Event
 business process. See Steps: Manage Customer Invoice Proposals for more information.

Proposal Preview

On the
View Customer Invoice Proposal
 report, you can select
Preview Proposal
 to preview the formatting of your invoice proposal.