Connect to Workday Financials

Connect PlaidCloud to Workday Financial Management using an Integration System User (ISU) and a customer-supplied Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) report to pull financial data, and post accounting journals back over Workday’s SOAP API. This guide covers the connection, the import step, and the post step.

Caution

Run every import against a sandbox tenant first, and work through Validate Only below on every post batch before posting live.

Note

This is a different connection from the generic Workday REST connector, which targets Workday’s REST API for HR and payroll data. Workday Financials uses Workday’s SOAP web services and RaaS reporting instead — use this connector for financial data and journal posting.

Prerequisites

You need, in Workday:

• An Integration System User (ISU) dedicated to PlaidCloud, with an Integration System Security Group granting it access to the financial data and the Submit Accounting Journal business process.
• Your Workday tenant host (for example wd5-impl.workday.com) and tenant name.
• A Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) report you’ve built in Workday that returns the data you want to import, published with Web Service access so PlaidCloud can call its URL directly.

Note

Workday Financials doesn’t expose a fixed set of canned entities the way NetSuite or Business Central do — instead, you build the extract as a RaaS report in Workday (using Workday’s own report writer) and give PlaidCloud that report’s URL. This puts you in control of exactly which fields and rows the import returns.

Create the Connection

1. Open Tools > Connections and click New Connection.

2. Choose Workday Financials from the menu.

3. Fill in the fields:

   Field	Value
   Name	A friendly name, e.g. Workday Financials Prod.
   Tenant Host	Your Workday host, e.g. wd5-impl.workday.com.
   Tenant Name	Your Workday tenant name.
   ISU Username	The Integration System User’s username.
   ISU Password	The Integration System User’s password.

4. Click Create.

Smoke-Test the Connection

1. Build a small RaaS report in Workday and publish it with Web Service access.

2. Add an Import Workday Entity step to a workflow, set Workday Connection to your connection, RaaS Report URL to the report’s URL, and Target Table to a scratch table.

3. Run the step (see Running one step in a workflow).

A populated target table confirms the ISU credentials, tenant host, and report URL are all correct. An error names the problem — bad credentials, a wrong tenant host, or an ISU missing access to the report.

Import Data

1. Add an Import Workday Entity step and set Workday Connection, RaaS Report URL, and Target Table.

2. Add Filters to bound the pull — company, ledger, period, accounting_date (range), ledger_account (range), and cost_center are passed as report parameters when your RaaS report defines matching prompts.

3. Run the step and check the target table.

Caution

Filters only reach a report parameter your RaaS report actually defines as a prompt. If a filter you set has no matching prompt on the report, PlaidCloud rejects it rather than silently ignoring it — add the prompt to the report in Workday first.

Post Journal Entries

The Workday Financials: Post Journal Entry step posts accounting journals through PlaidCloud’s shared ERP write pipeline, using Workday’s Submit_Accounting_Journal SOAP operation.

1. Build a header table — one row per journal entry — with journal_id (your entry identifier), company, ledger, accounting_date, and memo.

2. Build a lines table — one or more rows per journal_id — with ledger_account, debit, credit, and any worktag (cost center, project) columns your journals require.

3. Add a Workday Financials: Post Journal Entry step, set Workday Connection, Header Table, Lines Table, and a Result Table.

4. Leave Validate Only checked and run the step — PlaidCloud builds and checks every entry without a ledger claim and without posting anything.

5. Review the result table (one row per entry: journal_id, natural_key, confirmation_id, status, message). Fix any error row and re-validate.

6. Uncheck Validate Only and run again to post for real. Leave Continue On Error checked unless you want a batch to stop dead on its first failed entry.

How Posting Works

PlaidCloud calls Submit_Accounting_Journal for each journal entry and, because Workday’s own business-process approval chain can hold a submitted journal before it’s actually posted, polls the entry’s business-process status until it reaches a terminal state. An entry is only reported posted once that terminal state is confirmed — an entry that’s submitted but stuck in an approval step stays quarantined rather than being recorded as posted, so a pending approval never silently passes as success. PlaidCloud’s own ledger claim guards against submitting the same entry twice on a retried or re-run batch.

Correcting a Posted Entry

This step never deletes or rewrites a posted journal. To correct one, post a new entry with debits and credits swapped against the original — a posted reversing entry — rather than editing the original in place. This preserves Workday’s own audit trail and matches how corrections are made directly in the application.

Capability Limits — Read Before Posting Live

Caution

• Import depends entirely on the RaaS report you build. PlaidCloud has no canned Workday Financials entities — the report’s fields, prompts, and access control are all defined in Workday, not by this connector. A report change in Workday can change the shape of your import without any change on the PlaidCloud side.
• Business-process approval adds latency. If your Submit Accounting Journal business process routes through approval steps, a posted entry may sit pending until someone approves it in Workday — the terminal-state poll waits for that, so a post can take materially longer than a call to an ERP with no approval chain.
• This connector is distinct from the generic Workday REST connector. That connector targets Workday’s REST API (HR/payroll); use it only if you’re not connecting to Workday Financials.

Related

• Workday Financials Connector — field reference.
• Import Workday Entity
• Workday Financials: Post Journal Entry
• Review ERP Post History — the standing record of every Workday Financials post attempt and its live state.
• Create and Manage a Connection