Workday Foundation Update Provides Holistic View of Financial Health

The PGA is an organization of nearly 28,000 professionals dedicated to promoting inclusion in the golf community and introducing more players into the sport through events, tournaments, coaching, and more. To support this mission, the PGA sought to utilize financial and accounting data to identify trends and capture information that could guide the organization’s decision making and future path.

First, the organization needed to overhaul its existing Foundational Data Model (FDM). In its prior state, accounting staff spent a lot of time tracking down data and pulling reports for end users rather than focusing on ways to utilize financial data strategically to make high-level decisions for the organization.

The PGA had made a prior investment in Workday and wanted to use the platform as a tool to analyze financial data, connect to associated resources and tasks, and deliver key insights, such as identifying the most profitable event in a specific year. Additionally, the organization sought to empower internal groups with access to financial reports via self-service dashboards that would display information in easily digestible charts and visuals that are updated in real-time. 

To achieve these goals, the PGA engaged CapTech to work shoulder-to-shoulder with its financial, accounting, and technology staff to establish its Workday platform as a true system of record— with organized financial data, established data integrity validations, informational dashboards, and augmented reporting tools.

The CapTech team worked closely with the PGA to:

Listen to and understand current-state pain points surrounding data entry, data quality, and data visualization

Design and implement a new FDM within Workday that provides a consistent, hierarchical data structure to support financial reporting free from prior data gaps

Clean up historically misaligned Events and miscoded Cost Centers, create critical validations for common Workday financial transactions, and utilize Workday’s “allowed worktag” feature to refine selection lists to only present allowable combinations of Events, Programs, and Cost Centers for Headquarters entries

Gather and respond to feedback received from a cross- section of multi-functional leaders and end users, called Business Area Champions and Pilot Groups, through regular demos and releases

Transfer specific Workday knowledge sets to PGA team members, empowering them to maintain the new FDM structure and financials dashboards going forward

The project kicked off in January 2021 and took just under eight months from start to finish. Once the financial data was organized within Workday, the PGA was able to easily access and interpret key information, resulting in:

• Increased accuracy of financial reporting across 37 Sections and PGA Headquarters, enabling the PGA to answer key business questions, compare Events and Programs, and reduce blank lines in reporting due to prior data gaps
• Improved data integrity in the PGA’s financial data set
• Easy user access and interaction with critical financial data through self-service features
• Answers to 87% of critical financial business questions through Headquarters Financials Dashboard and 23 critical financial business questions through the Section Financials Dashboard
• Access to new dashboard reports that have been run more than 2,500 times by end users since the launch of the Section Financials Dashboards

CapTech’s collaboration with the PGA provided data improvements and visualizations that gave end users access to trustworthy, timely, and relevant information and enhanced the Workday platform to transform the organization’s overall financial integrity.