An organic farm in Kauai. A global bank. An emerging tech company. All are part of Cushman & Wakefield’s vast client base. As a global real estate powerhouse, Cushman & Wakefield provides property, facilities, and project management in 60 countries for its clients around the world.
The sheer volume of processing $1.5 billion of labor billings and more than 100,000 invoices each year is both massive and complex. Meeting client demands requires timely and accurate invoices, financial records, and other transaction documentation.
It’s no small feat. “Our methods are customizable and complex for each one of our clients,” says Michelle Sinn, director of Global Non-Brokerage Billing. “We have large volumes of data to go through—about 7 million transactions a year.”
Changes on the fly.
Cushman & Wakefield enlisted the help of Workday services partner Intercrowd to develop an app to manage these transactions more effectively.
Using Workday Extend, Intercrowd worked closely with Cushman & Wakefield’s development team to deploy Journal Line Reclassification, which enables users to automatically make corrections in the accounting process and revisit entries, correcting them after the fact. Bulk fixes and ad hoc adjustments can happen without manually searching thousands of spreadsheet entries. Now, the firm can adjust journal lines on the fly or divide costs by percentages, hours, or dollars across multiple work groups.
The benefits were clear and immediate. Because Cushman & Wakefield was already using other Workday applications, all the data was readily available. Leaders saw savings of $1 million a year because they no longer needed 6 to 8 people to manually update journal lines. The new app also reduced the amount of time it took to update journal line entries from 45 minutes to 4 minutes. Error tickets dropped by 75% within 75 days of going live.
“The information is much more accurate,” says Sinn. “If you’re cutting and pasting stuff from spreadsheets like we did before, mistakes happen all the time. This is a huge win for us.”
It’s a one-stop shop with everything accessible in one unified Workday system. We don’t need to try to configure a new tool.
Global Director of Finance Systems
Accurate records.
Cushman & Wakefield has 13,000 employees out in the field—about one quarter of the firm’s workforce—who submit weekly time sheets that need to show where and how they used any given working hour.
“Employees sometimes forget to add into their time sheet that they worked at another location, so our accounting team would have to manually add it back in through spreadsheets later,” Sinn says. “Doing time sheet corrections was time- consuming.”
Now? “You hit the edit button to move hours to another project, and it automatically does it,” Sinn says.
Quick search.
With the app, employees can quickly find a line entry to change or update without having to pore over dozens of entries in a spreadsheet.
For example, if someone wants to search for a particular company within the U.S., you can filter with additional criteria such as “USA” for faster results.
You can also search for a meeting that was held years ago by date range to see who attended. Or who picked up the tab at a business lunch to determine which office was billed and then reallocate some of the expense to other departments. You can also search by a particular project phase. The list goes on.
It’s all done seamlessly at one time. Everything is more accurate and concise for the end users.
Director of Global Non-Brokerage Billing
Scale upward and outward.
Cushman & Wakefield’s software development team is now managing the app and making updates.
“Intercrowd did the groundwork for us,” Sinn says. “But now that our in-house technical data team is managing the app, our employees can enhance it and make it better.” Examples of some of the upgrades include additional reporting and sorting functions.
The firm is also using Workday Extend to develop new apps. “We have just built our first application in-house, and our team hit it out of the park,” Sinn says. “It’s incredible.”
Sinn’s colleagues are just getting started. “We feel that this is just the beginning of our journey with Workday Extend,” Sinn says. “As a company, we’re always looking to scale upward and outward.”
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