Since the launch of the new Expenses Hub on Workday in February, the average time from claim submission to reimbursement has dropped from 35 business days to five calendar days.
“My experience with Workday Expenses has been wonderful and, in my opinion, the program is a huge upgrade,” said Professor Tara Flanagan, Chair of the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.
“With the old system, it was often the case that a PDF would have to be approved multiple times, go back and forth over a change of a few cents. It seemed like a waste of energy.
“Now we are saving time, are no longer frustrated by a clunky system and can focus our energies on better serving our students and faculty members,” she said.
An impressive accomplishment
“It’s encouraging to see the clear impact this is already having on day‑to‑day work,” said Fabrice Labeau, Vice-President of Administration and Finance and co-sponsor of Workday Expenses. “The project teams should be proud of what they’ve accomplished.”
Professor David Stephens, Horizon McGill’s Academic Lead, agreed.
“As the first large-scale project delivered in the spirit of Horizon McGill, Workday Expenses sets a high bar for future Horizon initiatives,” he said. “It’s impressive not only in terms of outcomes, but also because of the team’s commitment to continuous improvement.”
From feedback to solution
The project – which was co-led by IT Services and Financial Services in collaboration with local finance teams and the HR Workday team – began with a series of consultations.
“I think most of the concerns came from the experience of academics, who were filing a lot of very complex expense reports,” said Professor Jim Nicell, the Academic Lead for Workday Expenses and former Dean of Engineering.
“When you were faced with questions about how to handle specific complex situations or even “what do I do next?” it was actually hard to find information. and that led to errors,” said Nicell.
This problem affected both expense claimants and financial administrators, who needed to make up for the lack of built-in guidance.
“There was a lot of back and forth with claimants to ensure the expense reports were compliant,” said Batchimeg Zuend, Director of Finance in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
“What we asked for was to avoid all of this and have the system itself tell you what you need to know. And I think we did a good job as a university to configure a system that helps people,” said Zuend, pointing to the integrated help buttons and alerts in the Expenses Hub.
Saying goodbye to the ‘shoebox method’
The project team worked for about a year to design a new expense reporting tool in Workday, the platform McGill has been using for human resources management since 2020.
From the outset, the idea was to create an easy-to-use self-serve system.
One of the key features is a receipt scanner accessible in the Workday mobile app – a useful option for those who need to keep track of expenses during long trips.
This is a welcome change from what Nicell calls “the shoebox method.”
“What people often used to do was throw receipts into a metaphorical shoebox and then at the end of the trip, rummage through them and try to make sense of it all,” he said.
“The app that’s on your phone now allows you to track transactions in real time so you don’t have to rebuild the history later on.”
Continuous improvement
“As with any system-wide change, there’s going to be a period of adjustment as issues are identified and corrected,” said Julie Ghayad, Senior Director of Systems and Transaction Services in Financial Services and Business Team Lead for Workday Expenses.
As a first-time user, one of the issues Nicell encountered was accidentally choosing the wrong account number for his expense.
“What was interesting was how quickly the error was caught – it was within minutes. I discovered the source of the error, corrected it and provided feedback that we need to rename some of these accounts to avoid this in the future.”
Zuend echoed the importance of this feedback loop, noting that her team has been actively sharing observations and potential improvements with the project team.
According to several users, one of the main challenges is processing expenses for students and visitors who do not have access to Workday – an area that the project team is actively working to improve.
“Please keep sending in your feedback, ideas and questions,” said Ghayad. “This tool was built on community engagement and that’s how we will continue to make it better.”