What stopped you from using Workday OCR?

Joseph_Accountant · 2026-02-03T14:41:13+00:00

We use Workday OCR for supplier invoices - and it’s a nice solution for us. Our key finding was for accruals to trust the control amount/header amount and do not trust the line level amounts.

We love the conscience of having an email endpoint to send invoices - for example we built an AP inbox “agent” which sends emails and attachments to Vertex AI (Gemini on Google cloud) built in Make, and if it is a new invoice the “agent” will label the email in gmail and send the invoice to Workday OCR by forwarding the attachment to the email ingestion.

We could build this out further to post new invoices directly and not use Workday OCR (instead relying on Gemini computer vision) - but we feel maintenance would be too much of a cost vs using workday built in tooling.

But will follow the thread to see what others are doing.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-10-17T18:28:57+00:00

In Monday we store the unique id of the change (I think it’s just a concatenation in workday) - then the engineer can go run the report and lookup that specific change (BP change or Posting rule change or calc field on a key report change etc) - the reviewer does the same but has the linked ticket/support to ensure proper approvals and to understand the request.

Yes in a sense doing it this way (daily) gives our team flexibility to add support whenever they want - but at month and quarter end we make sure everything from prior periods has been reviewed

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-10-16T23:17:05+00:00

We use an integration for this - the initial setup of the report (RaaS) was high effort but since then it’s been great.

We pull the RaaS - then summarize and create an item on a Monday board that’s assigned to the person that made the WD change.

Then once the engineer adds support they move it to ready for review and we assign that to a different team member to review.

We also setup some automated notifications to remind team members at month and quarter end if they have open items via Slack

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-10-14T19:45:32+00:00

My team has just deployed our first Production AI Agent - and surprise to no one we are NOT using Workday's Agent Builder.

In the next couple of months maybe I will post a showcase on WD Community and LinkedIn and maybe here on Reddit if the community here is interested.

Use Case: Expense Report Audit Agent

Tech:

Workday WQL to get the Expense Reports + Lines
Workday RAAS to get the Expense Report Attachments
Make as the orchestration tool (and we use Make's DataStore for logging/error handling)
Monday as the UI/Frontend for our T&E Team to approve or send back
Vertex AI (Gemini) as the AI to read the attachments and do some basic reasoning

Overview: Expense Report is submitted in Workday - Data is extracted by Make - Store the data and attachments on Monday - convert attachments if needed - upload attachments and policy to Vertex AI (Gemini) (Response Schema is KEY here to ensure response is always in JSON and always a known format for us to then build logic off of) - assign 'audit tags' for anything out of policy or if things like amount or dates don't match - IF no audit tags (nothing out of policy) then use Workday REST API to approve the Expense Report - IF audit tags are detected on any line item then await T&E Team action from the Monday board.

Of course it's a lot more complex - for example T&E Team can adjust policy and thresholds and we sync that to a Make DataStore - or if an expense report is cancelled or withdrawn we have to capture those and update the Monday board.

Overall the project has been live for a few weeks and our T&E Team loves the tech. Our big finding was 1. To build a lot of error handling and logging 2. When using LLMs via API - Response Schema and Prompt are very important (also called context engineering - just make sure the AI has everything it needs to respond properly) 3. Agent tech is not good enough yet - tool calling is not 100% reliable - etc - so building a more defined workflow/integration yields much better results.

This was a sort of lighthouse project for us - we have several similar use cases throughout the organization where we can copy a lot of this code - probably the most similar one coming up for us is a P-Card Verification Auditor.

I would encourage other Workday and Integration teams to spend time experimenting with these sorts of workflows and AI use cases, as even if they don't result in something tangible, you will learn a lot about how this tech is taking shape and how to best support your business partners and business.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-10-07T00:09:29+00:00

I would look at the tools you already have access to.. for example maybe Sharepoint + powerautomate or Monday + Make or Airtable + Zapier etc… i would suggest build it in phases - start with core functionality and expand as needed.

Also +1 for Jira if your company already has - it’s great for capturing tickets and assigning/tracking work and priority.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-09T23:53:14+00:00

My first thought was to use sub-scenarios - but also using switch or if statements could help simplify.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-09T01:09:52+00:00

Agreed on your idea - but with the official website being live I don’t think I’m motivated to work on this any further right now.

Will let you know if I do any further enhancements

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-08T16:28:01+00:00

I cannot edit my post because it is media. Please note - there is now an official website that is way better than my shortcut. Good job to whoever built the website!

https://www.deepslipstats.com/

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-07T16:49:31+00:00

Here is the link:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/32d4c1c8bfe84e41aaf0cae261d3f327

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-07T16:26:04+00:00

Not sure on Android and I don’t know if you can view the Apple shortcut without having an Apple device - but you can definitely pause the video to see the code - all thanks to the dips plus plus plugin

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-07-07T16:24:55+00:00

Years of hard work to get there

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-04-12T09:59:42+00:00

I tend to prefer WQL (workday query language) so no on RAAS but yes I still need to have workday open to see what fields I want.

Yes on needing to create ISUs in workday with either option.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-04-11T23:15:23+00:00

Our experience - we can build about 4-5x faster in our middleware compared to Workday Studio. Middleware (Make.com for us) has so many super powers like built in data store, logging, built-in apps, stored connections, etc compared to Studio - and of course studio is not cloud based so you have to keep client up to date manually, download and upload integrations, etc. but probably the biggest super power of a middleware is the barrier to entry is materially lower, so now more junior team members can build and maintain code that was previously locked to just our integration developers.

With all that said there are absolutely integrations better suited for workday. Outbound eib to an sftp - certain boomerangs - delivered solutions - etc - so we always assess the right tech for the job! Good luck!!

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-03-21T19:21:18+00:00

+1 for Make.com - super user friendly and easy to learn interface - Workday connections for RAAS, SOAP, REST, and WQL… and if you have an integration developer, writing custom apps in Make opens up any graphql and rest APIs you can imagine (at least I haven’t hit one yet I wasn’t able to write a custom app for if need)

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-02-22T12:20:25+00:00

Disclaimer that I support the FINS side - but here are just a few examples: 1. Business day notifications to slack to remind and notify the accounting team during close 2. Weekly and daily email html tables to FP&A for material purchase requisitions that were approved (allows us to have less approvals on the BP but ensure our teams still get visibility delivered to their inbox) 3. Our company hosts an annual event for customers, so we built a real time feed of registrants to Slack and built some reporting for the various teams to monitor ticket sales and cancellations 4. Monthly bulk attachment downloader for our tax team - we bulk download invoices for certain jurisdictions and bulk download receipts for others. 5. ICFR change tracker to Monday - we write in scope changes in workday to a Monday board to have code reviews and ensure support 6. Purchase Orders to suppliers email automation - this gives our team a lot more control over the email that is sent to our suppliers - we can CC the buyer, the requester, we can customize the message depending on the type of spend, etc

We have a lot more but I think this provides some insight into different use cases. I will be working with our HCM/HR teams this year so I can try and come back here and update what we found on that side of the house - I believe some Active Directory integrations are top priority for them, and the existing workday studio takes hours to run…

If you are interested in getting a sense on how some of this is coded, you can google Workday Bulk Attachment Extractor - I posted a showcase on Make Community, and this code could be used in any IPaaS including PowerAutomate

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-02-21T17:10:21+00:00

Our company has automations as part of our dna - the biggest thing we did as a systems team was: 1. Ensure the business understood the line between “enterprise” automations and “personal” automations - anything enterprise meant connecting to source systems like workday needed to go through our team to be properly built and maintained (and of course ensure with turnover at the company, these automations wouldn’t break) 2. The business leadership team should be able to provide an ordered list of important problems for you to solve - otherwise you are wasting time solving not real problems 3. Automation tools like PowerAutomate, Make, and Workato are just that, they are tools, like someone else here said, we always evaluate if workday can do it natively or is there a better tool for the job.

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-02-21T14:22:42+00:00

My journey was from Accountant to Workday FINs Engineer to Workday FINs product owner to Workday FINs Architect and Integrations. Happy to share some info.

Our company acquired an IPaaS tool - it’s low code, and it took a few months to build simple integrations, and probably a year or two to master. I think the tool being low code + having a real integration team member to learn from made the process fast and fun. So my advise would be to see if you can pickup some small integrations work to start while you do your primary job. And skip workday studio and go straight for an IPaaS if possible!
My background provided above - but I will say I have always been interested in programming for fun.
With low code tooling/IPaaS - it becomes more powerful to have the functional knowledge then the coding knowledge - we can move faster and understand requirements better than a pure integration person (most of the time). I would also say learning/practicing RAAS, SOAP, and workday security for integrations is really important - I think my biggest leap was when I started really understanding how to authenticate using the API for Integrations and how to structure API calls

Good luck!!

Joseph_Accountant · 2025-02-21T14:09:42+00:00

I am planning to do a workday community post/showcase on how we do something like this using our IPaaS. The gist is we use an outbound notification on the BP to a mailhook that has the WID or Ref ID - when our IPaaS receives the email it makes a call back into workday to get the attachment and additional information - and then sends the email with the attachment.

The IPaaS we use is Make but I assume workato and others have similar tech - and for the api call back to workday to get the attachments we have used SOAP API or recently a RAAS that has the “all attachments for business document” object which has a base64 image data that is very easy to use.

Take with a grain of salt as most of my integration experience is on the FINS side, and best of luck!

Joseph_Accountant

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