Name: Workday Finance Solutions for Insurance: Driving Smarter Decisions with AI and Advanced Analytics
Uploaded: 2025-10-16T18:16:07.063Z
Duration: 43 min 52 s
Description: Workday Finance Solutions for Insurance: Driving Smarter Decisions with AI and Advanced Analytics

Transcript for "Workday Finance Solutions for Insurance: Driving Smarter Decisions with AI and Advanced Analytics": Hello, everyone. We'll get started at one minute after the top of the hour to allow people just a little bit more time to get signed in. Looks like we got people slowly starting to trickle in. Give them about thirty more seconds and get started. Alright. We'll go ahead and get started now. Thank you for joining us today for our Workday Finance Solution for Insurance webinar. We're glad that you could join us for this Workday Live presentation. My name is Joe Smithai. I will be hosting today's live webinar. I am a financials solution consultant, on the financial services team here at Workday, and I'm calling in from Tampa, Florida. My background has been deploying Workday Financials to customers just like you for over eight years and prior to joining the solution consulting. In those eight years, I've been on 50 plus projects, including an insurance customer out of Saint Petersburg, Florida. I am joined by my colleague, Sam Shikarchi. Sam is also a solution consultant, and his background has been working in the insurance industry. So he used to sit where you sit. So Sam is going to be handling the questions as they come in through the q and a feature in our chat today. Speaking of questions, everyone will be on mute. If you do have questions, simply click the q and a button on your screen, and Sam will address the questions as they come in. This webinar is being recorded, and it will be available on demand after we have concluded. One of Workday's core principles is innovation. In a such, we release features twice a year. If I speak to any of those forward looking features, I will be clear to call that out. Any purchasing decisions you make should be based on what is currently available in the product. We have several goals with, Workday live sessions. First, we want to highlight opportunities to expand or enhance your investment in Workday. We also want to provide additional education about what you already have. And most importantly, promote lasting partnership because ultimately, your success is our success. If you have any specific deployment or configuration related questions, please contact your customer success manager. There's a different way to grow your organization with everyone working together using the same data. That's why at Workday, we built the solution of industry leading HR and finance applications unified in one platform. AI built into the core of our product with Workday Illuminate. It's not a bolt on. Native reporting and analytics, a single security model, a pre pre delivered library of business processes with always on audit and integration capabilities. What this means for you is reduced costs. You can reduce the expense of maintaining multiple point systems, increased efficiency. You can minimize interruptions with a seamless unified system, and more innovation. You can free up time for your teams to focus on strategic initiatives and drive change. So here's our agenda for this session. Today, we'll you'll see us walk through the business process framework and always on audit. You'll see our multidimensional ledger, also known as work tags, as well as real time reporting available to you. Then we'll take a look into what accounting center is all about. So you'll see where we can bring in those front office systems and marry that data with Workday data to provide rich reporting and insight into your business. We'll also briefly you know, we'll touch briefly on allocations and then even some statutory reporting in the next hour. So with that, let's jump right into the product and see Workday in action. So what you're seeing here is Workday's landing page for Teresa Serrano. She's our controller for global insurance services. She's our walking, talking segregation of duties, violation because we just gave her full permission today so she can step through several features here in the platform. We'll start briefly with a navigational tour before we dive into our first demonstration. From the top left to right, we have our menu. Here, we have applications and dashboards grouped into categories like fine core financials, that's available based on a person's role assignment. So Teresa has access to full financials, so she has dashboards and applications like, you know, consolidate and close, auditor dashboard, settlement where payments are ready to be made, cash management, bank reconciliation, as well as other spend management reporting. Next to it, we have shortcuts, which allow you to quick link to your favorite tasks or reports. These are configurable by each user. And in the middle, we have our global search box. This is Workday's enterprise search functionality, which quickly helps you find tasks, reports, employees, suppliers, customers, any business object, all based on your security. Next, we have notifications and my tasks or inbox. Notifications alert the users such as when an expense report has been approved or paid out or a scheduled report has been run. Workday's inbox is an aggregation of past waiting users to take action out. We'll look at that inbox here shortly. To round us out, just go over our landing page so you can configure announcements. You can configure announcements company wide or to specific sets of users. You can include important dates. Machine learning learns the top applications that you're using and presents them here. You have your team highlights, which can include anniversaries coming up, be be it work you know, birthday anniversary or work anniversary. Family suggestions, like if you have new learning coming up in HCM or if you have corporate credit card transactions being integrated into Workday and have corporate expenses awaiting you to take action on. Alright. Lastly, the user profile. Here, we're gonna navigate to Teresa's HR profile where we can see her summary information. So her job profile, when she started at the organization, jobs, the organizations that she belongs to, benefits. And because Workday is a unified platform, you have your people and pennies in one place. We have things like company property where you can see the credit card assignment to Teresa as well as business assets, be it capital or expense that you wanna track on an employee. Alright. So that concludes our navigational tour. So we're gonna dive into our demonstration. We're going to review and approve a supplier invoice. That invoice has been created, submitted for approval, and is currently awaiting Teresa to take action. And to review it, we're gonna navigate to Teresa's inbox. Workday's inbox, it's his central nervous system. All transactions that route through the business process framework and require an action finds its way to an inbox based on security group. And in Teresa's security inbox, she has some period closed activities, journals and requisitions to review and approve. She also has, that supplier invoice for us to take action on. Here, we have our supplier invoice, and it's what we expect from a modern financial system. We have a view of that entire invoice without having to navigate to another module or another system. Everything Teresa needs to review and approve is right here in the inbox. We have our company supplier, the currency, total amount due, as well as things like terms and taxes and invoice reference information. But more importantly, in the invoice line, again, we have our company, what it is that we're buying, as well as our financial dimension, such as call center, location, and our operational dimensions. Why is that important? Well, these dimensions are going to transform our general ledger into a multidimensional general ledger. And because of that, enrich our reporting and give us rich insights into our data. None of these details are going to be stripped away. So scrolling down, we see the process history. We can see who initiated it, who's approved this invoice up to this point, and this process history will live in perpetuity with the transaction. So based on this invoice from BMS market research related to market research for the technology sector, everything looks good to improve. Theresa has the ability to approve this transaction, send it back for any edits that may be needed, or add an ad hoc approver if she determines that an additional set of eyes, need to be on this transaction. So here, we're gonna go ahead and approve it. And if after approving this invoice, what we're gonna see is a green checkbox. Screen checkbox means two things. First, this invoice has gone through the entire business process and completed. Again, we can go expand on the details and process, look at the process tab, and have access to that process history with who completed this, who approved this transaction, and when it was approved. Again, this lives in perpetuity with this transaction. So, you know, it saves you time during an audit and capturing approvals along with any attachments right from the transaction itself. Second, Workday has gone ahead and created an accounting journal and posted it to our general ledger in real time. No more batch processing. Now that this transaction is posted, let's see Workday's real time reporting. And to do that, Theresa is going to run a core financial report and income statement. I'm gonna run a income statement five quarter trend, and I'm gonna run it for our consolidation in North America. We have the ability to run it by a company level or at a company hierarchy or consolidation level. And Workday provides you the ability to create unlimited hierarchies based on how you want to consolidate how you want to report. Right. So as I hit okay, Workday is in real time, consolidating, translating, and eliminating to present this high level income statement for us. You don't have to wait until month end to get a consolidated view of your business. You can run a consolidated report at any time. Now just wanna orient everyone to this report. So we have our last five quarter end up at the top with our quarter end budget and a conveniently positioned variance analysis. And if you notice, we have a lot of these numbers in blue. And if it's in blue, that means it's a clue. We can start investigating, against this number. So any report that you run-in Workday is going to be not just a report. It's going to be analytics, and analytics is at the core of Workday. So Theresa wanted to look at total cost and expenses because it's slightly lower than the previous quarter end. She can now start drilling by all of these dimensions. Some of these dimensions were on our transaction, like supplier, BMS market research, division, call center. They were all dimensions that we have captured on our supplier invoice transaction, which now we have the ability to slice and dice our data to get to the answers that we want. So I'll start by slicing the data by company. Right? So we know we have five companies within this hierarchy, within this consolidation group, and we can continue to slice and dice the data by spend category. So we had market research. There is no predefined drill path that you are required to take. You can start drilling on any of these dimensions to get to that answer get to that insight, Or we can just click at the business document, and with a few clicks, I'm right back to that supplier invoice. No more running reports in a reporting tool and reconciling back to your GL system. You can drill from a high level income statement, consolidated income statement, all the way back to this source transaction with a few clicks. This is the power of a unified financial system where analytics is at the very foundation of our platform. So what we just saw was the business process framework in action. The business process moved the supplier invoice to Teresa's inbox for a pool. No more stacks of invoices on your desk. No more approving through email to be printed out and attached to a paper invoice then filed away. Everything is tracked and documented within the system. Again, nothing moves in Workday without going through a business process that was designed to be configured or maintained by your finance team. Then we saw the real time multidimensional general ledger, aka the work tags, enriching our accounting transactions so that we have real time reporting readily available. We saw that we were able to run a consolidated income statement with eliminations, with translation, all in real time, and drill all the way back to that supplier invoice with a few clicks. No more batch processing, no more consolidation company, or integrating our subledger data to a BI tool for reporting, all within the secure confines of Workday. Now let's work into accounting center. You all are very much aware and understand that there's a lot more information pertaining to insurance than just financial information. So you'll probably capturing a lot of additional pertinent information on your policies, such as policy type, sales channel, agent. So how nice would it be if you could use some of that information in the analysis that you're performing? We have a tool that can help you do just that. I'd like to introduce you now to Workday Prism and accounting center. So from an accounting center standpoint, this is really what the flow looks like. This diagram helps understand the data flow from your front office systems all the way through that rich reporting available in Workday. Over to the left, you've got your front office systems, your policy and claim systems, your broker system, treasury and investment systems, and lastly, any third party system. This data is then brought into Prism Analytics where it is transformed and enriched and then run through the accounting rules engine, which is configured by finance to result in detailed journal lines that are then summarized and posted to your general ledger. And you will have the ability to easily drill back so that you have full visibility, that full audit trail as to how that summarized journal came to be. And because you're bringing in all of that data, the end result is all your reporting in one place. You're able to do financial reporting and analysis, able to do operational analysis, management reporting, as well as other kinds of reporting on that data, all within Workday with the ability to drill back to that event level detail. So with that, let's get back into the product and see the results in action. Alright. So starting with the end in mind, let's go take a look at, results of bringing in those front office transactions. First, let's take a look at an executive scorecard. This is giving us high level visual indicators based on all that front office transaction being brought into Workday. So you can get a high level insight and determine where you want to focus on today. So in this dashboard, we have our KPIs, loss expense ratio, investment indicators, and claims metrics that and it's indicating to us that, you know, open claims is on the rise. So we can go in and start in our investigation. This is the type of dashboard you can create with the data that you're bringing in. Now to do some additional analysis, let's go to our insurance financial analysis dashboard. This is an example of a dashboard that you may deliver to an operational or business user. In the first time, we have our consolidated income with quick links to reporting binders and discovery board analytics. We'll come back to this shortly. But here, you can see we have our claims analysis tab. Here, we've got all kinds of information being brought in through Prism and accounting center. We have that claims metrics that we just saw, but then we also have visual reports against different types of claims that we have. So we have reports like claims claim amount, trend by policy type, auto claims by claim type and region. I was just reading an report earlier that said Florida is one of the high states where I live for auto insurance premiums. We have property claims by claim type and region and then just overall claim by product. Again, our reports are not just static. They're analytics. So you have the ability to ask questions. So if I'm looking at my total claims by product and I have 4 and a half million dollars in other, I'd like to see what that is. So I can start drilling down by my GL attributes, my financial dimensions to see what my other others are. I also have the ability not just to drill in or slice the data by my GL attribute, but my subledger attributes. So claim status, agent ID, claim type. Is there a reinsurance treaty in place for that? So all these subledger attributes coming in from your front office claim system. So let me just take a look at marine inland marine, and we can take a look to see if there's any reinsurance treaty available there. So out of the 58, we can see that nine of them have a reinsurance treaty. I can continue drilling down, or I can just click into either my account or my claim amount. And what that's going to do is it's going to bring up those underlying transactions. Zoom out a little bit. Alright. So what we're looking at is transactions with, you know, our company, our ledger, our GL attributes. But to the right, we have all of our additional attributes, that's what that AA stands for, coming in from our claim system. We're looking at the event level details. So we're looking at specific claim, claim date, policy subtype information. This is the type of in informations the type of data that we can bring in to help you make informed decisions, to give you that real time visibility into your business all in one place. So how do we get here? Let's go take a look at a financial report. And in the process, let me help you connect the dots of what we saw in the accounting center slide. Let's go back to that consolidated results tab, and Theresa is now going to investigate. Let's zoom out a little bit. Here we go. Alright. So Theresa is going to start in her investigations from a consolidated income statement. She wants to look at her losses incurred in policyholder benefits. So would you start drilling down by, again, our core accounting elements, operating dimensions, and then Workday transaction data? You have ability to grow by any of these information. I wanna start our grow by journal source. Journal source informs us where this transaction is coming from. So we can see that we have 13 plus million dollars coming in from our claim systems and 2,900,000.0 through deck amortization. Yes. Workday accounting center, we can perform those direct deck amortizations for you. And I can just start drilling in again by my operational dimensions. So, again, looking at product, looking for my inland marine, And I can continue slicing and dicing, or I can just click into that amount. And what it's gonna do is it's gonna pull up that summarized journal. I don't know why this is happening. Alright. Zoom in. Here we go. Alright. So I'm gonna go back to that slide to kinda make sense of this. We saw an operational analysis dashboard. Now we're looking at a financial report and doing our analysis. And in the process, we just opened up a summarized journal that was posted to our general ledger. So here, we're seeing information like the ledger account, our financial dimensions that we care about on our general ledger, and the debiting credit. Great. But what if we wanted to get more detailed information? We have the ability through Prisma and accounting center to be able to drill down to the subledger detailed transaction. Now we're looking at, in this slide, the debt detailed accounting journal that was generated from a file through our claim system. Again, we have that same level of company ledger account work tag information. But here, we have all of those additional attributes that came in from our file. We're seeing about seven to nine here, but there is no limit to the number of additional attributes we can bring in from your front office system. We have customers bringing in hundreds of additional attributes to support their reporting, needs. And at that subledger detail level, we're looking at event level details. So we're looking at transactions by policy ID, claim ID. So how does this all get created? To do that, let's go look at our accounting rules engine for our claim system. So what we're gonna look at right now is that accounting rules engine. You can create rules by transaction type. So you can have one set of rules for your policy, transactions coming in, another set of rules for your claim system transactions. I'm gonna put this into a edit mode so we can see this a little bit better. So you have your transaction file coming in from your claim system getting enriched and transformed. That file then goes through the accounting rules engine where from that file, we're getting the company. We're telling the system to post it to our actuals. From the file, we're getting our accounting date, and we're using a journal source that we listed out so that on reporting, we can quickly identify where that transaction came from. Now the journal lines, we're able to configure. Again, this is not coding. This is point and click configuration. We're able to code or configure condition rules to let it know is this a ceded loss or a retained loss. Based on our condition rule, The file looks at the company for the journal line, the debit amount to reinsurance receivable and get our transaction amount from the ceded loss column. All this while mapping to our work tag dimensions so that core general ledger dimensions that's posting to our ledger account also bringing in those additional attributes. Here, we have about 45 to 50. Remember, there's no limit, to the amount of additional attributes you can bring in. And we have customers bringing in hundreds of attributes to support their reporting. And then the last, the summarization rule, how Workday summarizes your transaction. So that was the accounting rules engine where it's configured or maintained by the finance folks. So you can turn up make it make changes, updates, and, you know, configuration changes quickly without relying on IT. Lastly, we'll take a look at our accounting center batch kind of to show you that data lineage that we support. So here, this file went through four different stages. The batch initiation where it got ingested into prison, the enrichment process, the detailed accounting, and then finally, the summarization that got posted to the general ledger. What transactions in, success transaction, if there wasn't any errors, Workday has a error manager, which allows you to drill into each individual lines that error now, identify if it's a mapping issue, make correction, and then push it back to the system to be posted. You also have the ability, that data lineage that I talked about, to go through and see the view accounting source stages. So you can go all the way back to that batch file that's before the enrichment or transformation and trace back to your source system if you needed to do that. Alright. So you just saw accounting center in action. The ability to take that dashboard report and drill into by those dimensions and attributes that are coming from your claim system. You saw me do the same thing from a core financial report, a consolidated income statement. So bridging that power and that detail and that knowledge from those front office systems into Workday, You're able to do the analysis you need all within one system, all within Workday's single security model with full data lineage and audit trail. Now I I wanna touch briefly on allocations. So I know a lot of insurance companies use allocations extensively. And many of those allocations our allocation rules and calculations live in Excel, where it's wonderful and terrifying at the same time. Would it be nice to create your allocation rules and calculations in the same system you have your transactions and then automate the process? So we'll look and see what allocations look like here in Workday. And to do so, there's no better place than the allocation work area. It is a one stop shop for a controller to come in and kind of review and, you know, review all the allocations across companies. Again, our one security model applies. So if an accounting manager for one company has access to this area, they would only see the allocation for their company. So what we're looking at is a cockpit view of all allocation and where it is within that month. So we're looking at allocations by company. We can group allocations into a group set. So this monthly allocation has two sets of allocation definitions. We can build in dependencies so that they run in sequential order, or they can both run at the same time. You can configure that. And right up here, we get the statuses of HR allocation group set. So So we can see the monthly allocation hasn't been run. If they've been run, are they in draft status? Do they need to be rerun? Are they in a pro form a status? What that means is you run the allocations, you have the results, but you haven't posted it to the general ledger. But in pro form a status, Forte allows you to pick up those results and include them in your p and l review. You have the ability to do that to see how this allocation impacts your p and l. And just going across the top here, process exception, Workday alerts you if the source data has been changed. So if you have a marketing expense or tax accrual, if the source data where you're picking up for your allocation has changed since you run it, Workday will alert you. So at month end, you can review this to see if there's any new transactions posted against one of your source ledger accounts that you need to pick up. Allocation not finalized, it's exactly what it is. These allocations have not been finalized. You can finalize them with a click of a button here, or you have the ability to run them in mass. So you can run allocations for all companies or for an entire company with one task. And lastly, allocation details. Here, you'll see things like your allocation amount, what the dependencies are within a group set, when it when was the run the last time. Alright. So let's go in and take a look at one of these allocations. So let's take a look at our allocation, allocate marketing cost by product. So this is an allocation that's been run. The allocation source has changed, so we will need to cancel and then rerun this allocation. But what Workday is going to do is when an allocation is run, we do have a business process for that too. So you always know when it was run. There's any approval of who approved it. You'll always have access to the source transaction. So here, we're looking at a total of $1,800,000, but that's summarized. You have the ability to drill into the source detail and get to all the transactions that add up to that 1,800,000.0. So here, there's total of 76 transactions supporting our source amount. We have our basis. Now this could be based on transactions already loaded in Workday. This could be transactions that you load into Workday such as number of claims against the product type. This could be for but used by square footage. If you do facilities allocation by square footage, you have a number of ways to bring in, data for your allocation break basis. And then, again, your offset and target based on your basis. All of this will stay in the system in perpetuity. So when an audit comes along and you need to find your allocation and give them your source information, your the basis, the targets, all of this is stored in Workday in perpetuity. Alright. Let me just go in quickly and take a look at an allocation definition to show you how quickly or simply these can be configured. Always like putting things in edit mode as a previous implementer, just more natural for me. So up at the top here, you know, you just have the details of the allocation, which company is going to be using it, and then the source. Right? You're identifying the source type, what percentage of that source to allocate, and then your source filter. What are you trying to pick up? You can be as specific as a ledger account, a supplier, a spend, or you can be generic as ledger account summary. Right? So you want everything from your p and l to be picked up that has a specific supplier. And then your basis, it can be prorated, can be fixed percentage, spread even. Some of those require a statistic definition to be loaded in, such as square footage or number of claims reported. You can load that in manually. You can load that in through a a spreadsheet template upload, or you can have an integration bring in that statistic definition. And then the last two, the target and offset, you're just essentially telling Workday where to offset this and where you want that target allocation to go. It can go to the same source company, or you can specify a intercompany allocation using this allocation definition. Alright. Now just to drive this home a little bit more, I wanna highlight a couple of customer stories. First off is Arbella Insurance out of Quincy, Massachusetts. Before Workday, they had an Excel based and time consuming process for allocations. Data extracted from their GL system, manipulated through formula, and then loaded back into their GL system using some sort of upload. I've been there. I know that pain. With Workday, you're transacting and allocating out of that same system. No more extraction and reloading. The data integrity is kept intact. Arbella had 55 allocations, and the process is now fully automated. It takes a fraction of the time now to run and finalize those allocations. Next up is CNA. Some of the facts and figures from them to show you that our allocation engine can scale at large. They have over a thousand call centers, over 500 programs, and they produce I think the latest number is over 5,000,000 journal lines a month from allocation, and that number will continue to grow. So that was allocations. What do we just see there? Through the Workday allocation area, we saw one central location for all allocation activity. The configurable allocation definition lives in Workday, saving you time. This is not a bolt on or a separate system. Everything is on a single platform, be it allocations or reporting. Again, coming from Excel in a previous life, I truly appreciate the automation available for allocations in Workday. The power of allocating from the same system we transact and removes the need for reconciling or double checking the pay the work, especially since that allocation definitions are built into the system and won't error out like formulas in Excel. Alright. We're getting close to the end. Let's look at our last topic, statutory reporting. Back in the product, we're going to look at that executive scorecard again. But this time, over to the right, we have our insurance reports. We can help produce those statutory reports that you have to run. So we can run the schedule d report. We can also run Had my investment summary schedule here. Here we go. My investment summary schedule. These reports can be exported to Excel or PDF. We can certainly export them to a statutory reporting tool like Guidewire or Stone River among many others. We're able to produce the information that is necessary for you to produce your statutory report. So what do we just see there? First off, we saw again that high level executive scorecard specifically related to insurance. We saw that schedule b and the subject of many of the summary investment schedule, allowing you the same level of drillability and export options. Now I just wanna round us out with some views of our current customers in this space. Now this is not an exhaustive list, but I do want to highlight some of these customers like CNA, Aon, Shelter Insurance. Now that you've seen a demo, what's next? Contact your sales account executive to get your questions answered. You can also access the recording on demand using the link you registered with or by contacting your sales account executive. If you are interested in additional customer webinars, please scan or access the link here. This presentation is just one of our customer education series across the entire Workday platform. Thank you again for joining us. Have a great rest of your Workday.