Workday Financial Management and BigCommerce integration

What moves between them

Order and customer data flows from BigCommerce to Workday Financial Management. When a new order is placed in BigCommerce, ml-connector receives a webhook, fetches the full order details and customer record via REST, maps the customer to Workday, and creates or updates a Workday customer record and associated revenue GL journal entries. Order transactions are captured and allocated to GL accounts by order type or channel. Customer updates in BigCommerce trigger customer master updates in Workday. Refunds and order cancellations flow the same direction and reverse GL entries in Workday.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted: the Workday OAuth2 refresh token and BigCommerce API key. For Workday, it refreshes the bearer token before each SOAP or REST call and caches the tenant URL per customer. For BigCommerce, it validates the incoming webhook signature using HMAC-SHA256 and the registered client secret. BigCommerce webhook payloads are stubs, so ml-connector immediately calls the REST API to fetch order and customer details; this two-call pattern is intentional and matches BigCommerce design. Customers are mapped by email address between systems; new BigCommerce customers create new Workday customer records with a configured prefix, and order totals are posted to GL accounts mapped by order channel or tag. Workday journals are created as single-entry or multi-line depending on order line complexity, and reference the BigCommerce order ID for audit and replay. If a Workday journal submit fails (GL account not found, balance issue, rate limit), ml-connector queues the retry with exponential backoff and tracks the failure in the audit log. BigCommerce webhooks auto-deactivate after 90 days of inactivity, so ml-connector alerts when inactivity is detected.

A real-world example

A mid-market fashion retailer runs Workday Financial Management for accounting and procurement across multiple warehouses. They also operate a BigCommerce storefront for direct-to-consumer sales. Before the integration, the finance team downloaded BigCommerce order reports daily and re-entered order totals into Workday journals by hand, then spent time reconciling BigCommerce customers against the Workday customer master. With Workday Financial Management and BigCommerce connected, each order flows into Workday automatically and posts revenue to the correct GL account based on product category, customer records are always in sync, and the daily manual export and re-entry step is gone.

What you can do

• •Receive BigCommerce order and customer events via webhook and sync them into Workday Financial Management as customers and GL journal entries.
• •Map BigCommerce order totals to Workday GL accounts by order channel or custom worktag and create multi-line journals for complex orders.
• •Validate customer emails and create new Workday customers from BigCommerce where they do not already exist.
• •Refresh Workday OAuth2 bearer tokens automatically and handle SOAP WS-Security with the Integration System User account.
• •Audit every order transaction, replay failed GL postings, and alert when BigCommerce webhooks are inactive for 90 days.

Questions

How does ml-connector handle BigCommerce webhook stubs and fetch full order details?

BigCommerce webhooks send only the event type and record ID, not the full order payload. ml-connector receives the webhook, validates its HMAC-SHA256 signature against the client secret, and then immediately calls the BigCommerce REST API to fetch the complete order details and customer record. This two-call pattern is by design and allows ml-connector to work with the full order data including line items and transactions.

What happens when a Workday GL account is not found or a journal entry fails to post?

ml-connector queues the failed journal for retry with exponential backoff over 48 hours and logs the failure in the audit trail. Retries include diagnostic information such as the GL account code that was not found or the balance check error, so the finance team can investigate. Once the GL account is created or the blocking issue is resolved, ml-connector automatically replays the journal.

How are BigCommerce customers matched to Workday customers?

ml-connector matches customers by email address. If a BigCommerce customer email matches an existing Workday customer email, the order is posted to that customer. If no match is found, ml-connector creates a new Workday customer with a configured prefix (such as 'BC-') and stores the mapping for future orders from that customer.