Healthcare financial leaders face constant pressure to modernize their operations while maintaining accuracy and compliance. With complex revenue cycles, multiple payment models, and ever-changing regulations, it’s a difficult task that leaves many hospitals and health systems struggling to efficiently manage their financial data—especially when relying on disconnected, manual operations.
Workday’s Accounting Center offers a solution to these challenges, enabling healthcare organizations to automate and streamline their accounting processes while providing deeper financial insights. If you want to learn how Workday Accounting Center can transform your healthcare organization’s financial operations, here’s what you should know.
What is Workday Accounting Center?
Workday Accounting Center is a financial data management solution that centralizes, transforms, and automates accounting processes by integrating operational and financial data within Workday’s ecosystem.
By uniting front office and operational systems with the back office, Accounting Center gathers data from various sources—including patient billing systems, supply chain management systems, and human resources systems—and translates these business events into detailed data.
RELATED: Why You Need a Workday Staffing Partner
Not only does this automation reduce the need for manual data entry, but it also reduces the risk of errors associated with manual entry while decreasing the time required to input and review financial data. This results in faster-resolved variances, reduced time to close, and deeper insights, all of which allow your financial team to do more with less—while freeing them up to focus on other, more complex tasks.
Common Financial Challenges in Healthcare
Healthcare organizations face complex accounting and financial data challenges that impact compliance, efficiency, and even profitability. Some of the biggest concerns include:
- Revenue & Expense Management. Providers often have complex revenue recognition requirements due to various payment models and reimbursement structures. With data coming in from multiple sources, expense recognition can become a hassle. Manual data entry can cause lost or mislabeled expenses, leading to costly errors, and deferred and prepaid expenses are often mismanaged, delaying financial close.
- Electronic Health Record (EHR) Integration. This can make it difficult to track patient-related revenue and expenses. Further, this overflow of information, especially if entered manually, can result in incorrect entries, lost information, and delayed payments.
- Managing Complex Structures. Many healthcare organizations often have complex business structures, such as hospital systems with multiple facilities or departments. While basic software may be able to create separate, unique entries for each system or department, customized data with more in-depth detail on each entry often isn’t available.
- Regulatory & Compliance Demands. Constantly changing healthcare regulations require frequent system updates, and non-compliance can lead to fines, audits, and reimbursement issues. Plus, ensuring that the accounting software is up to date with new and revised regulations requires additional time for review and pauses all financial activity for the duration, which results in more lost time and delayed payments.
- Cash Flow & Financial Stability. Hospitals and health systems often face cash flow challenges due to delayed reimbursements, high accounts receivable balances, and unpredictable revenue cycles. Without real-time visibility into cash inflows and outflows, organizations may struggle to optimize financial planning and resource allocation.
6 Benefits of Workday Accounting Center
Workday Accounting Center is well-equipped to address many challenges unique to the healthcare industry. From managing large, disparate sources of data to ensuring compliance, Workday Accounting Center offers hospitals and health systems multiple benefits including:
1) Streamlined Data Management
Workday Accounting Center automatically transforms operational data from multiple sources into standardized accounting entries that comply with revenue recognition standards. Regardless of how many sources the data is coming from, Accounting Center can translate everything from patient billing to supply chain data into aligned records that follow the same user-defined rules.
Not only does this automation result in fewer errors, but the automated error handling also manages and flags issues during data intake, further reducing manual review time and improving accuracy. This leads to more reliable reporting and analysis, which also improves efficiency and decision-making.
2) Easy Integration with EHRs
Workday Accounting Center integrates with EHR systems to provide a seamless flow of information between clinical and financial systems. This can help hospitals and health systems gain a more complete picture of their operations and improve financial reporting—all while reducing complexity and time spent.
3) Accurate Expense & Revenue Recognition
Additionally, Workday Accounting Center streamlines complex healthcare revenue cycles by automatically handling various payment models and reimbursement structures. The system accurately tracks expenses—including deferred and prepaid expenses—while ensuring proper revenue recognition across all payment types.
For hospitals and health systems with multiple facilities or departments, the software allows for the creation of a virtual sub-ledger. This feature transforms summarized journals into more granular detail, providing richer financial and operational reporting for individual subsidiaries. Plus, the advanced reporting functionality through these details provides a thorough look into your organization’s full revenue cycle.
With a complete audit trail of all accounting transactions, Workday Accounting Center makes it easy to track the origin and transformation of all accounting data.
4) Regulation Compliance
Implemented correctly, Workday Accounting Center enables organizations to adapt to changes in regulations and industry standards without significant disruption. This flexibility is crucial in healthcare, where regulations and accounting standards are constantly evolving.
Healthcare organizations can more easily comply with accounting regulations through the software’s audit trail of all transactions, reducing the risk of compliance issues and potential penalties. The software also supports internal and external reporting, as well as audit requirements by tracking changes to accounting rule configurations and data transformations.
5) Customizable for Your Organization’s Needs
Workday Accounting Center provides a configurable framework that allows your organization to tailor the system to your specific needs and processes. This flexibility ensures that the system can adapt to the unique requirements of different providers and changing regulations.
The system tracks and documents changes to rules and mappings, enhancing transparency and accountability in accounting processes while also helping document modifications for auditing purposes. Plus, users can define accounting rules in business language—not code—making it easy for accounting teams to manage and modify rules.
6) Increased Cost Savings & Operational Efficiency
Finally, Workday Accounting Center unites front-office and operational systems with the back office by integrating and transforming business events into detailed accounting data—leading to faster-resolved variances, reduced time to close, and deeper insights. This reduces back-office architecture complexity, lowering the cost of ownership while increasing efficiency.
Furthermore, Workday Accounting Center gives financial teams control over data transformation, reducing their dependence on IT departments. This allows finance professionals to manage accounting rules and processes more effectively, leading to greater agility and responsiveness.
With automated accounting processes, your finance department has more time to focus on more strategic initiatives—which provides a thorough ROI on implementing the software across your organization.
Things to Consider Before Implementation
While Workday Accounting Center offers significant benefits for healthcare organizations, a successful implementation requires careful planning and consideration. Before moving forward, it’s important to consider several factors, including:
- Implementation Timeline and Resources. Implementing Workday Accounting Center typically requires a substantial time commitment—often 6 to 12 months depending on your organization’s size and complexity. Ensure you have dedicated resources who can manage the transition while maintaining day-to-day operations.
- Data Migration Complexity. Converting historical financial data from legacy systems can be challenging. Organizations with years of complex financial records should anticipate additional time and resources for data cleansing and migration to avoid integrity issues.
- Integration Limitations. While Workday Accounting Center excels at integration, not all healthcare systems connect with equal ease. Legacy EHR systems or specialized healthcare applications may require custom interfaces, potentially increasing implementation costs and complexity.
- Training Requirements. Despite its user-friendly interface, Workday Accounting Center represents a significant change in how accounting teams operate. Comprehensive training is essential, and productivity may temporarily decrease during the transition period.
- Customization vs. Standardization. Although the platform offers customization, healthcare organizations should carefully evaluate when to adapt the software versus when to standardize their processes. Over-customization can create maintenance challenges and complicate future upgrades.
- Ongoing Support Needs. After implementation, your organization will need staff with Workday expertise or a partnership with a qualified Workday service provider to manage, maintain, and optimize the system as your needs evolve and as Workday releases updates.
By realistically addressing these considerations upfront, healthcare organizations can develop an implementation strategy that maximizes the benefits of Workday Accounting Center while minimizing disruption to critical financial operations.
RELATED: Building a Workday Resource and Staffing Plan for Healthcare
The Bottom Line
As healthcare providers continue to face pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency, Workday Accounting Center has the potential to transform healthcare finance. Not only does it support value-based care models, but its ability to integrate data from various sources—and provide real-time insights—can help healthcare organizations optimize resource allocation, improve patient outcomes, and thrive in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
Ready to learn more? Contact Healthcare IT Leaders to get started. As a trusted Workday Staffing Partner, our experts can help your organization implement—and optimize—Workday Accounting Center to meet your organization’s needs.