Workday Financial Management and Airbase integration

What moves between them

The main flow is Airbase to Workday Financial Management. Bills and purchase orders created in Airbase are synced into Workday's supplier invoices and POs with the correct GL coding and vendor mappings. Vendors are kept aligned in both directions so Airbase bill GL allocations land on valid Workday GL accounts and worktags. Payments and GL postings flow from Workday back into Airbase to maintain a complete spend record. Because Workday Financial Management has no native webhooks, ml-connector polls Airbase on a configurable schedule and reconciles against Workday's payables ledger to detect changes.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores the Workday OAuth2 refresh token encrypted and uses it to obtain short-lived access tokens, handling token expiry by requesting a new access token before calls fail. It also stores the Integration System User credentials encrypted and includes them in the WS-Security header on every SOAP request. For Airbase, it stores the bearer token encrypted and passes it in the Authorization header. ml-connector polls Airbase bills and POs on a schedule tied to your accounting calendar, maps Airbase vendors to Workday suppliers by name or a custom field, and validates that GL account codes exist in Workday before posting. Workday's lack of native webhooks means ml-connector cannot receive pushed notifications, so all changes are detected through periodic polling with date filters. Bill amounts, line items, and GL distributions are matched to Workday's GL account structure, and any vendor or account mismatch is logged in the audit trail for review before posting to the general ledger.

A real-world example

A mid-sized professional services firm uses Workday Financial Management for general ledger, accounts payable, and financial reporting, and Airbase for centralized spend management, vendor payments, and corporate card reconciliation across multiple offices. Before the integration, the AP team exported bill summaries from Airbase weekly and manually entered them into Workday by vendor and GL account, then spent several days each month reconciling Workday's AP aging against Airbase's bill register. With Workday Financial Management and Airbase connected, every bill created in Airbase flows into Workday with the correct vendor and GL coding, vendors are synchronized so account assignments are always valid, and month-end reconciliation starts with AP already aligned to the source bill data.

What you can do

• •Sync bills and purchase orders from Airbase into Workday Financial Management as supplier invoices with correct GL coding and vendor assignments.
• •Map Airbase vendors to Workday suppliers by name or custom identifier so GL allocations land on valid accounts.
• •Keep vendor master data aligned in both directions between Workday and Airbase.
• •Authenticate Workday with OAuth2 refresh tokens or Integration System User SOAP credentials, and Airbase with static bearer tokens.
• •Poll Airbase on a configurable schedule with date filters and track every record in a full audit trail.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Workday Financial Management and Airbase?

The main flow is Airbase to Workday Financial Management. Bills, purchase orders, and vendor records move from Airbase into Workday's payables with GL coding and vendor mappings applied. Vendor master data is aligned in both directions so coding remains valid in Airbase. Payments and GL postings can flow from Workday back into Airbase to maintain a complete spend record.

Does ml-connector handle the token refresh for Workday's OAuth2 authentication?

Yes. ml-connector stores the OAuth2 refresh token encrypted and automatically requests a new short-lived access token before it expires. For integrations using Integration System User (ISU) credentials, ml-connector includes them securely in the WS-Security header on every SOAP request without requiring manual refresh.

How does the integration work around Workday Financial Management's lack of native webhooks?

ml-connector polls Airbase on a configurable schedule tied to your accounting calendar using date filters to detect new and changed bills, then reconciles those changes against Workday's payables ledger. This polling approach ensures no bills are missed while respecting Workday's API rate limits, and every record is tracked in a full audit trail for compliance and troubleshooting.