Workday Financial Management and Anaplan integration

What moves between them

GL accounts, suppliers, and payments flow from Workday Financial Management into Anaplan planning models on a schedule tied to your period-end and forecast cycles. Journal entries and GL transactions can populate Anaplan's line items for variance analysis and budget comparison. Anaplan models cannot send data back into Workday, so the flow is unidirectional from Workday source data into Anaplan planning layers.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores Workday Integration System User credentials and Anaplan authentication separately, maintaining both WS-Security UsernameToken sessions for SOAP calls and OAuth2 refresh tokens for REST calls. On the Anaplan side, it calls the import and export actions you pre-create in your model, polling their task status until completion, then loads the result. Because Workday has no webhooks and Anaplan's rate limit is shared across all integrations, ml-connector staggers polling intervals and respects backoff on 429 responses. GL account hierarchies and supplier lists are mapped to Anaplan list items so payment records align to the correct planning dimensions. The integration tracks Workday's polling safety window (5 minute minimum, 15 to 60 minute recommended), respects Anaplan's model lock during bulk operations, and carries a full audit trail for every record imported so variance between source and target can be investigated.

A real-world example

A mid-market financial services firm runs Workday Financial Management for its general ledger and procurement across three regional offices. The controller uses Anaplan for quarterly financial planning and monthly cash forecasting. Before the integration, the consolidation team exported GL account balances and actual AP payments from Workday each month and manually loaded them into Anaplan as actuals to compare against the forecast. With Workday Financial Management and Anaplan connected, GL data flows automatically on a weekly schedule tied to the close calendar. The forecast model always reflects actual spend by account and supplier, variance reporting is available immediately without re-entry work, and the consolidation process starts with actuals already populated.

What you can do

• •Poll Workday Financial Management for GL accounts, suppliers, and payment records on a schedule you control.
• •Import GL transactions and supplier master data into Anaplan models and lists without manual export or re-entry.
• •Authenticate Workday via Integration System User WS-Security credentials and Anaplan via basic or certificate authentication.
• •Map Workday GL account hierarchies and supplier dimensions to Anaplan list items for correct planning allocation.
• •Track the full audit trail of every imported record and handle polling rate limits and Anaplan model locking without intervention.

Questions

Which direction does data flow between Workday Financial Management and Anaplan?

Data flows from Workday Financial Management into Anaplan. GL accounts, suppliers, payments, and journal entries are polled from Workday and imported into your Anaplan planning models as actuals for budget comparison and variance analysis. Anaplan planning outputs do not flow back into Workday, so the integration is unidirectional.

How does ml-connector handle the different authentication requirements for each system?

ml-connector stores Workday Integration System User credentials separately from Anaplan credentials, maintaining both sets encrypted. For Workday it sends WS-Security UsernameToken with every SOAP request and manages OAuth2 refresh token exchanges for REST calls. For Anaplan it uses basic or certificate authentication to obtain 35-minute bearer tokens and refreshes them as needed.

What happens when Anaplan's 600 request-per-minute limit is reached?

ml-connector detects HTTP 429 Too Many Requests responses and backs off with exponential jitter before retrying. Because Anaplan's rate limit is shared across all integrations in your workspace, ml-connector staggers polling intervals and avoids querying multiple models at the same instant. The audit trail logs every rate-limit event so you can tune polling frequency to fit your integration load.