Enhancement to Award Setup process helps reduce Payroll Accounting Adjustments

Modernization continues to receive feedback regarding the difficulty of the Payroll Accounting Adjustment (PAA) process and related tasks. Over the past few months, we’ve been working together with members of the WSU community to brainstorm, develop, and implement a series of solutions to help make PAAs easier and more efficient to perform, or prevent them from being necessary.

Currently, WSU staff perform an average of 1,955 PAAs per month. PAAs are run in a variety of instances, and while we cannot completely eliminate the need for all PAAs, we can implement solutions to prevent as many as possible, and make them easier to complete and review. While we continue to research and test potential solutions, one step to reduce PAAs is now in effect in Workday.

A new reminder, “Assign Costing Allocation for New Award,” has been added to the Award Setup business process. When a new award is set up in Workday, Grant Managers will receive an “Assign Costing Allocation for New Award” inbox task in the case of a new award’s budget including salaries, wages, or benefits. This new To Do step provides a just-in-time reminder to ensure costing allocations are set up as soon as possible after awards are created, eliminating the need for some PAAs to be completed in the future.

Grant Managers can review details and instructions related to this new process step in the updated “Create Award” reference guide in the Workday Knowledge Base. Additionally, we’d like to thank the attendees of the March RAC for their feedback on this solution.

The effort to reduce and streamline PAAs in Workday is an ongoing, high priority effort in 2024 for the Modernization team and involved members of the WSU community. We will continue provide updates on PAA improvements, including enhancements to business processes and updates to related Workday training and reference materials, in upcoming Workday Digests.

Questions? Reach out at the Workday Service Desk.