Coventry Building Society Improves Reporting Flexibility with Workday Financial Management

Workday, a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has announced that Coventry Building Society, one of the UK’s largest building societies, has successfully deployed Workday Financial Management, allowing them to reduce the number of spreadsheets used for month end reporting by almost 70%.

Coventry Building Society joins more than 10,000 global companies who have selected Workday, helping them to successfully manage two of their most important assets – their people and their money.

With Coventry Building Society growing rapidly in size over the last 20 years, the need to look for a new finance solution that could keep up with the ever changing business environment became increasingly important. The previous system had not been consistently updated, resulting in lack of standard reporting or integration. As such, Coventry Building Society was left with manual processes involving numerous work-arounds and hours spent manipulating data.

The Society’s people function made the shift to Workday Human Capital Management three years prior. Quickly after deployment, the Society saw positive results as the solution streamlined processes, enabled employee productivity, and improved informed decision making.

Coventry Building Society’s finance team and Workday collaborated to improve efficiency with a skilled and engaged workforce to ensure a successful go-live, with clear target outcomes, such as a three-day close and getting 80% of reporting standardised.

“Implementing the Workday solution has led to a significant reduction in outer system processes and a close-to 70% reduction in the spreadsheets that used to surround the Society’s month-end processes. This has been a huge, huge achievement,” said Andrea Harrison, head of finance transformation, Coventry Building Society. “Linked to that is an increase in the number of automated controls in our month-end processes, from less than around 5% to more than 70% of them being automated or semi-automated.”

The new system from Workday enabled Coventry Building Society to move from manually entering data across separate spreadsheets to analysing costs in one unified system at the touch of a button. Similarly, visibility into the transaction level was simplified as the implementation enabled team members to interface with the system via the Workday Accounting Centre, drilling down straight away at a transactional level instead of manually extracting reports.

“It was great to learn that Coventry Building Society was capable of a three-day month end within a few weeks of implementation,” said Dan Pell, vice president and country manager, UKI, Workday. “This successful deployment is a great example of the impact of our partner ecosystem, which enables customers to realise the full value of our solutions. We look forward to continuing to work with Coventry Building Society to help them manage two of their most important assets, their people and their money, in order to extract full value from the system, and add more strategic value to the company as a whole.”