Workday Financial Management and TrueCommerce integration

What moves between them

The flow runs primarily from Workday into TrueCommerce. ml-connector polls Workday Financial Management on a schedule for supplier invoices, purchase orders, and payment records, then transforms them into EDI documents (X12 850 purchase orders, X12 810 invoices, and related transaction sets). These documents are delivered to TrueCommerce's SFTP server for distribution to your trading partners. Acknowledgments (X12 855 PO acknowledgments, 856 advance ship notices, 997 functional acknowledgments) are polled from TrueCommerce and can be posted back into Workday as received documents. The mapping between Workday suppliers and TrueCommerce trading partner numbers is configured once during setup and reused for every transaction.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores Workday OAuth2 credentials (refresh token) encrypted and exchanges it for a fresh access token on every poll, refreshing whenever a call returns 401. On the TrueCommerce side, it stores SFTP credentials encrypted and connects to integrationftp.truecommerce.com on port 22 to pull and push files. For outbound transactions, Workday purchase orders and invoices are read from Workday's REST API, mapped to their respective X12 transaction sets (850, 810), and written to TrueCommerce's SFTP inbox under the customer-specific path confirmed during onboarding. For inbound, ml-connector polls the TrueCommerce SFTP outbox on an interval you set (typically hourly) for EDI responses such as purchase order acknowledgments (855) and advance ship notices (856), transforms them from EDI to Workday's journal entry schema, and submits them to Workday's SOAP Financial_Management service. ISA control numbers on EDI documents prevent duplicate processing. Rate limits and throughput are managed by TrueCommerce on the SFTP server, and every transaction is logged in the audit trail for replay if a downstream post fails.

A real-world example

A mid-sized manufacturing company uses Workday Financial Management for procure-to-pay and maintains relationships with dozens of suppliers and logistics partners, many of whom communicate via EDI through TrueCommerce's VAN. Before the integration, procurement staff exported purchase orders from Workday, manually converted them to EDI X12 format, uploaded them to TrueCommerce by hand, and then retrieved acknowledgments and shipment notices from TrueCommerce via email and re-entered key data back into Workday. With Workday and TrueCommerce connected via ml-connector, every purchase order flows from Workday to TrueCommerce automatically in the correct EDI format, is delivered to the supplier through the VAN, and when the supplier's acknowledgment returns, it is posted back into Workday as a received document. Month-end invoice matching and three-way matching for receiving no longer depends on manual data entry, and the procurement team regains hours per week.

What you can do

• •Poll Workday Financial Management on a schedule for purchase orders, invoices, and supplier data, and deliver them to TrueCommerce as EDI X12 documents.
• •Transform Workday purchase orders into X12 850 and invoices into X12 810, mapped to the trading partner numbers and accounts you configure.
• •Receive EDI acknowledgments, advance ship notices, and functional acknowledgments from TrueCommerce and post them back into Workday as journal entries and received documents.
• •Handle Workday OAuth2 token refresh, TrueCommerce SFTP credential storage and rotation, and prevent duplicate EDI processing via ISA control numbers.
• •Maintain a complete audit trail of every transaction, with replay capability if a TrueCommerce upload or Workday post fails.

Questions

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

The primary flow is from Workday Financial Management into TrueCommerce. Purchase orders and invoices are read from Workday, converted to EDI X12 format, and delivered to TrueCommerce for distribution to trading partners. Acknowledgments and shipping notices are polled from TrueCommerce and posted back into Workday. The mapping between Workday suppliers and TrueCommerce trading partner numbers ensures the correct partner receives each order.

How does ml-connector handle the different authentication methods?

ml-connector stores Workday's OAuth2 refresh token encrypted and automatically refreshes the access token before each poll. For TrueCommerce, it stores SFTP credentials encrypted and connects to the SFTP server on port 22. Both credentials are rotated independently, and expiry is tracked to prevent connection failures. Every credential read is logged but the actual credentials are redacted from logs.

What happens if a poll interval from Workday is too frequent or a TrueCommerce upload fails?

Polling Workday more frequently than every 5 minutes may trigger tenant-level rate throttling, so intervals of 15 to 60 minutes are recommended for transactional data. If a TrueCommerce SFTP upload fails, the transaction is logged with full detail and can be replayed without re-querying Workday. ISA control numbers on EDI documents prevent duplicate processing if a file is uploaded twice by mistake.