Rebekah, maybe you can ask for a separate cost center for collection
purchases to help, since that seems to be working fine here.
At Wake Forest University, during the planning phase for Workday, the
finance department created a separate new cost center just for the
collection purchases, so those are the only invoice purchases that I
approve, and the Library Admin Office continues to approve other types of
expenditures for operations (equipment, furniture, etc.). Credit card
charges are entered as expense reports of the individual card holders, so
they always run through the direct supervisor, which means I approve all of
those for my direct reports, no matter whether collection purchases or
travel.
Basically Workday has one processing stream for vendors with invoicing and
another processing stream for expense reports tied to a cardholder. Both
streams have a hierarchy of approval steps (clicking an approval button for
each invoice and expense report) based on the authority level assigned
(permissions set in the system) plus dollar ranges associated with the
authority level. The dollar ranges are set by Workday and cannot be
customized, which dictated who got which authority level assigned during
the planning process. From my limited perspective, that had less impact
than this: our workload in Acquisitions and Collection Management has grown
because we are depositing digital documentation (as Rebekah described
below) and doing data entry that used to be done by people in Accounts
Payable.
The University has been soliciting feedback about Workday impact, so via a
webform, I inquired about electronic invoice data transmission from the
library system into Workday. I have heard that this is being done somewhere
that has Alma and Workday, but I have also heard that the University would
have to buy another module of Workday to do that (and I don't know if that
is accurate). We're still on Voyager -- I have my fingers crossed for us!
Lauren
On Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 3:34 PM Rebekah Ostini <rebekah.ostini_at_furman.edu>
wrote:
> We went live with Workday on July 1, 2018, and it has significantly
> impacted our workflow in Acquisitions. Some of these features will vary
> depending on your institution’s policies, but here are the ways that we use
> Workday in Acquisitions. Note that we’re currently on Millennium, which
> does not integrate even the slightest bit with Workday. All our financial
> transactions must also be entered in Millennium for our own records.
>
>
>
> Invoices requiring a check payment are entered in Workday with an
> electronic copy of the invoice attached.
>
> Credit card purchases are entered in Workday with a receipt attached.
>
> Purchases over a certain threshold require pre-authorization, which is
> entered as a requisition in Workday.
>
> Purchases over another threshold require a sole source justification,
> which is submitted through Workday.
>
> Credit card purchases are reconciled in Workday.
>
> Budget management is handled through Workday.
>
> Travel expenses are handled through Workday.
>
>
>
> All processes that are run through Workday must be approved in Workday by
> the appropriate people.
>
>
>
> I will be upfront about the fact that it’s been a significant amount of
> work to make the transition. There’s a general consensus in the library
> that Acquisitions carries the brunt of the changes imposed by implementing
> Workday. Our staff have invested quite a few hours in workshops and
> individual training sessions, and we’ve met multiple times with people from
> Finance to go over how the changes work best with our procedures. We’ve
> mostly settled into the new routine now, with the occasional question or
> glitch needing to be addressed.
>
>
>
> One issue we experienced was that our campus initially decided to
> integrate purchasing from our office supply contractor and from Amazon with
> Workday. They’re technically compatible, but there were a number of
> technical issues that ultimately resulted in discontinuing use of that
> feature, much to our relief. During the time that Amazon was integrated
> into Workday, we had to access Amazon through Workday (rather than
> directly), and every individual title had to be ordered as a single order
> and processed through the approval structure. It was extremely
> time-intensive and required multiple people to touch each transaction
> multiple times.
>
>
>
> Probably the biggest challenge we faced was the approval structure for
> expenditures. In Workday, each department is called a “Cost Center” and is
> assigned a single Cost Center Manager. This manager is responsible for
> approving every single expenditure for that department. In our case, the
> library director was assigned as the cost center manager. She was
> immediately inundated with notifications that items needed her attention in
> Workday – because every single purchase in Acquisitions requires approval
> by the cost center manager. The vast majority of spending in the library
> came from the Acquisitions department, so we requested that I be set up as
> the cost center manager instead. This meant that all expense requests in
> the library came to me – including travel expenses, meal reimbursements,
> office supplies, etc. I had to forward any non-Acquisitions requests to the
> director for a second approval. This was cumbersome and confusing. We
> worked with Finance to brainstorm a solution, and we ended up setting up
> the library with two cost centers. One is for books/periodicals/electronic
> resources and one is for everything else. I’m the manager for the first and
> the director manages the second. This workflow is working well for us.
>
>
>
> A couple of other changes we made to our workflows – because each purchase
> has to be run through Workday, and our ILS doesn’t communicate with
> Workday, we were spending significant time entering duplicate records. We
> decided to reduce the amount of work with our two largest vendors, Amazon
> and GOBI. With Amazon, we have a line of credit established, so we can
> purchase using the LOC and then pay the invoice once a month. Individual
> Amazon transactions are still entered in Millennium, but we only have to
> enter the monthly invoice in Workday. We also estimated the likely amount
> we’d spend with GOBI based on past years and established a deposit account.
> This allowed us to enter the deposit account invoice once in Workday, while
> we can still track all the individual purchases and invoices in Millennium.
>
>
>
> If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
>
>
>
> Rebekah Ostini
>
> Coordinator for Content Management
>
>
>
> FURMAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
>
> 3300 Poinsett Highway | Greenville, SC 29613 | 864.294.2193 |
> rebekah.ostini_at_furman.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* acqnet-request_at_lists.ala.org <acqnet-request_at_lists.ala.org> *On
> Behalf Of *Corbett, Lauren
> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 19, 2019 4:49 PM
> *To:* acqnet_at_lists.ala.org
> *Cc:* Sathi, Katherine <ksathi_at_wustl.edu>
> *Subject:* Re: [ALCTS-acqnet] Acquisitions and Workday
>
>
>
> I'm also interested in answers to these questions since we are on our
> first fiscal year in Workday here and we are manually entering invoice data
> into Workday. We have primarily EDI invoicing with Voyager.
>
> Lauren
>
> --
>
> Lauren Corbett
> Director of Resource Services, Z. Smith Reynolds Library
> Wake Forest University
> 336-758-6136 ISNI: 0000 0003 5170 369X
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 4:32 PM Sathi, Katherine <ksathi_at_wustl.edu> wrote:
>
> Hello collective wisdom –
>
>
>
> Our campus will be rolling out Workday, beginning with the financial
> management module, in the next year or so.
>
>
>
> Here at the Libraries we are discussing to what extent this new
> environment will impact our Acquisitions workflows, and I’m curious to hear
> from other libraries that are currently using Workday.
>
>
>
> How have you altered workflows to accommodate Workday? Is there any part
> of the Acquisitions process that takes place within Workday? Invoicing is
> one example that comes to mind, are there others?
>
>
>
> Thanks very much for any insight you can provide!
>
>
>
> Kate
>
>
>
> Kate Sathi
>
> Collections Services Librarian
>
> Washington University in St. Louis
>
> ksathi_at_wustl.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 21 2019 - 14:02:09 EST