If banking and cash are messy in Workday, you feel it every single day: duplicate bank accounts, unclear payment statuses, painful reconciliations and no single, trusted view of cash. Workday Cash Management and Banking & Settlement are designed to do the opposite: centralize bank accounts, standardize settlements, and give treasury real-time cash positioning across all entities.
A clean design is less about clever configuration and more about simple, disciplined patterns. The goal: every outgoing payment and incoming receipt is traceable from Workday to the bank statement and back, and your cash position is obvious, not a guessing game.
Step 1: Treat bank accounts as master data, not “just details”
In Workday, Bank Accounts are first‑class configuration objects, not just text fields on payments.
Key ideas:
- Maintain a central register of bank accounts used for payments, receipts and working funds.
- For each account, capture: bank, branch, account number/IBAN, currency, owning Company, and which settlement types it supports (AP, Payroll, Customer Receipts, Misc).
- Use clear naming so users can distinguish accounts in the UI (for example, “US‑BOA‑AP‑USD”, “EU‑HSBC‑AP‑EUR”, “US‑BOA‑PAYROLL‑USD”).
Good practices:
- Minimize the number of operational bank accounts to reduce reconciliation workload and fraud risk. Many Workday customers consolidate AP accounts as part of their implementation.
- Restrict who can create or change bank accounts; treat them like sensitive master data with proper approvals.
- Configure which Payment Types can use each bank account (checks, ACH, wires, SEPA, etc.) so users cannot accidentally route the wrong payments through the wrong account.
When bank accounts are clean and governed, everything else—settlements, reconciliations, cash views—becomes more predictable.
Step 2: Understand how settlements tie subledgers to cash
Workday’s Settlement engine sits between subledgers (AP, AR, Payroll, Expenses) and your bank accounts. It groups transactions, triggers payments, and produces the items you reconcile.
Core concepts:
- Settlement Runs (or payment runs) pick up eligible items (supplier invoices, expense reports, customer refunds, etc.) and create payment instructions against a specific bank account.
- Settlement Types and Payment Formats control how Workday talks to the bank (files like ACH, SEPA, BAI2, MT940, or APIs).
- Each settled batch becomes a set of entries that update cash and clearing accounts in the ledger.
Patterns that keep things orderly:
- Align settlement runs with your operational rhythms:
- For example, AP: twice weekly; Payroll: per pay cycle; Misc payments: weekly.
- Use clear naming and scheduling for settlement jobs (e.g., “US‑AP‑ACH‑Mon/Wed”, “EU‑AP‑SEPA‑Tue/Thu”), so finance and treasury know what to expect each day.
- Make sure each bank account is associated with the right Settlement Types only; do not let one account handle everything unless absolutely necessary.
This discipline means that when you see a payment on the bank statement, you can quickly identify which settlement run and Workday transactions it came from.
Step 3: Bank reconciliation without the spreadsheet circus
Workday’s Bank Account Reconciliation and Cash Management apps are where you prove that Workday’s view of cash matches the bank’s.
Typical process:
- Import bank statements
- Auto-match transactions
- Use the reconciliation rules engine to automatically match bank lines to Workday settlements and ad hoc bank transactions based on amount, date, reference and other fields.
- Define matching rules that prioritize high-confidence matches and leave edge cases for manual review.
- Manual match and adjustments
- For unmatched items, use Match Bank Transactions or similar tasks to link bank lines to Workday items, or create Ad Hoc Bank Transactions for bank-only items (fees, interest).
- Use Bank Adjustment tasks for corrections (for example, bank fees, returned checks).
- Finalize reconciliation
- Once differences are resolved, mark the reconciliation as complete and generate reconciliation reports for audit.
Best practices:
- Reconcile high‑volume, high‑risk accounts (AP, Payroll, sweeping accounts) daily or at least several times per week.
- Keep matching rules simple at first; tune them based on real exceptions rather than trying to solve every scenario on day one.
- Regularly review recurring unmatched items; they often signal configuration or process issues upstream.
When reconciliation is embedded in Workday, spreadsheets become the exception, not the default.
Step 4: Cash positioning that treasury actually trusts
The payoff of all this is reliable cash positioning: a real-time view of cash balances and expected movements across all bank accounts and companies.
Key features:
- Cash Position reports show current balances by bank account, bank, currency and company, pulling from reconciled and in‑flight transactions.
- Cash Forecasting uses scheduled settlements, customer receipts and other expected flows to project future cash positions.
To make these views credible:
- Ensure that all bank accounts used for payments and receipts are represented and kept in sync with your actual banking landscape.
- Keep statement imports and reconciliations timely so “current balance” really means current.
- Include both settled payments and pending runs (for example, upcoming payroll) in your internal cash views where needed.
Finance and treasury can then answer questions like:
- “What is our cash by company and currency today?”
- “Do we have enough cash in EUR accounts to cover Thursday’s settlements?”
- “Which accounts should we sweep or fund?”
The more your processes consistently use Workday’s settlement and reconciliation capabilities, the more accurate your cash position becomes.
Step 5: Governance to keep banking and cash from drifting
Banking and cash configuration is high‑risk and high‑impact, so treat it with strong governance.
Practical guardrails:
- Segregate duties
- Separate configuration of bank accounts, initiation of settlement runs and approval of payments where possible.
- Restrict who can change bank account details and reconciliation rules.
- Standardize processes
- Document which settlement jobs run when, which team monitors them, and what to do in case of failures.
- Keep a simple runbook for bank reconciliation and cash reporting, especially for month-end.
- Monitor and improve
- Track metrics such as percentage of auto-matched bank lines, time to complete reconciliations, and frequency of bank-related journal corrections.
- Use these as feedback to refine matching rules, posting rules or upstream processes.
When Bank Accounts, Settlements and Cash Positioning are designed together rather than in silos, Workday becomes the place where you actually run banking and cash—not just record it after the fact. Treasury gets real visibility, finance gets clean reconciliations, and everyone spends less time chasing unexplained bank lines.
