Bursar Update - 1st August 2025
It is now three weeks since we went live with Workday. Activity levels are rising with 35,000 sign ons, 15,000 journals posted and 2,500 purchase requisitions completed.
We have developed our live cost centre reporting tool which we will roll out in days, with instructions and training provided. As noted before, this is not the full high quality reporting level we expect to get from Workday so see this as a stopgap.
On the research accounts side of things, we have uploaded transaction data for all accounts. We have a final set of journals to add in to about 200 accounts where there were gaps in the original eFin data – calculated after a ‘data cleaning exercise’ before we went live. These will be posted in the coming days.
We are encountering ‘budget check’ problems, where some purchase orders initially get blocked because the system determines there is no budget there for the order to proceed. The failure rates are higher than we would expect so we are exploring the following:
- Checking all the validation rules built into Workday
- Testing specific cases to establish what has gone wrong
- Rechecking our cost centre structure and data mapping from old system to Workday
This is of the highest priority for us and we will hopefully be able to report news on progress when we are back next week.
We have resolved a number of issues blocking expenses being approved and paid and reduced the uncompleted expense reports on the system from 800 to 550.
There are still a number of wider issues facing School Managers and Heads of School/Units. Next week, Helen Doyle and I plan to walk around campus and visit as many of these School/Unit offices as we can. If you would like us to visit your School/Unit, please let either of us know. We will start these visits on Tuesday.
We are also encountering a number of issues with the system in the Finance department, for functionality that most non-finance people would not see directly. We have a log of all issues identified, some more complex than others but all capable of being fixed. It will take time to resolve these, perhaps another two months however our focus will continue on resolving issues that impact the community most as a priority. I mention this to you to give perspective of the large scale challenge we have but also a pathway to complete delivery of this system which we will all benefit from very soon.
We have received very positive feedback from colleagues who have availed of the daily zoom drop in clinics, where you can receive individual support in a breakout room with one of the programme team, book here or visit https://www.ucd.ie/finpost/traininginformation.
Thanks again to all for your patience with the teething problems.
David