Construction companies face unique challenges, from managing complex projects and distributed workforces to maintaining tight control over financials. Workday has the potential to transform these operations, bringing together finance, HR and project data in a single system:
If you're leading a construction company, you know the pressures. Material costs are climbing while contracts stay locked at fixed prices. Project timelines often stretch as you struggle to find skilled workers in a tight labor market. Your team is likely buried in spreadsheets, juggling disconnected systems for payroll, project management and accounting. And somewhere in that chaos, you need real-time data to make decisions that protect your margins, but you're flying blind until it's too late.
The construction industry is at an inflection point. As companies grow, the systems that once supported their operations start to strain under increasing complexity. What worked at $200 million in revenue often begins to break down at $500 million. At the same time, rising expectations around real-time data, automation and AI-enabled insights are raising the bar for how organizations manage finance, workforce and project operations. Manual workarounds multiply. Data silos deepen. And the cost of standing still, both in dollars and competitive advantage, continues to rise.
This is why forward-thinking construction leaders are turning to Workday. Not because it’s construction-specific software, but because it solves the challenges that construction-specific systems can’t. It provides a single source of truth for your people, projects and financials, along with the scalability and intelligence you need to grow.
The pressures facing construction companies show up in many ways, but they often trace back to a few core operational challenges. Leaders need better visibility into project financials, more efficient workforce management and a system that can keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern construction. The right foundation gives leaders the visibility and control needed to keep projects on track and margins protected.
Often the most urgent challenge construction leaders face is gaining timely, accurate visibility into the projects already underway. When material costs spike mid-project and your contract is fixed price, you need to know immediately where you stand financially. But if your data lives in five different systems that don't talk to each other, that simple question becomes a weeks-long investigation. By the time you have an answer, you're behind.
The complexity of tracking expenses across massive, multi-year construction projects with hundreds of subcontractor invoices, change orders and cost allocations creates considerable ongoing challenges. Add in managing joint ventures, multiple legal entities and intercompany reconciliations and it's no wonder finance teams spend weeks closing the books instead of days.
Construction has always been people-intensive. Today, it's also people-constrained.
Skilled labor is in short supply, often unionized and subject to complex compliance requirements that vary by state and project. Getting the right people to the right project at the right time, all while staying compliant with union rules, certified payroll requirements and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards can be a logistical nightmare when you're managing across disconnected systems or manual methods.
Then there's the operational reality. You might hire a worker on Monday and release them Friday, only to bring them back the following Tuesday for a different project. That churn creates massive administrative overhead if every hire requires filling out numerous fields in your system and manually entering data into multiple platforms.
As construction companies scale through organic growth, vertical integration or acquisition they hit technical debt walls. Legacy ERPs that worked fine for years suddenly can't handle the transaction volume.
Similarly, custom-built systems become incredibly expensive to maintain and difficult to adapt. And the integration web between your construction management system, payroll platform, HR tools and accounting software gets more tangled with every addition.
Medium enterprise construction firms, particularly those exceeding $500 million in revenue, find themselves at a crossroads: Continue patching an increasingly fragile tech stack or make a transformational change.
Workday isn’t construction-specific software—and that’s part of its advantage. Many construction ERPs have been in place for more than 20 years, but their legacy architecture often restricts the flexibility and scalability growing companies need. When you're managing massive volumes of financial and operational data, you need enterprise-grade infrastructure. You need a platform that can scale with your business as you expand into new states, take on larger projects or acquire other firms and one that continues to evolve through regular platform updates and new capabilities.
Workday invests billions of dollars annually in platform development — orders of magnitude more than legacy construction software vendors can match. That investment delivers continuous innovation, from AI-powered anomaly detection to predictive analytics, all within a modern, intuitive user interface.
And here's what many people miss when thinking about software for your construction business: You still need to pay bills, pay people, track revenue and costs, manage compliance and make informed, data-driven decisions like any other business. Workday excels at these foundational capabilities while remaining flexible enough to adapt to your unique processes.
One of Workday's most compelling advantages for construction is integration, not just between modules, but as a fundamental architectural principle.
When your HR system sits on the same platform as your financials, powerful things become possible. Many project managers are already familiar with Workday from using it for HR functions. When they need to submit an expense or check project costs, they're working in the same familiar interface, not learning yet another system.
Your finance team can also see in real-time who's staffed to which project, with what certifications and at what cost. As an example, let’s say you need a certified welder for a new project. You can instantly see who on your bench has that skill and isn't currently assigned. That kind of integrated visibility is nearly impossible when HR and finance data live in separate systems.
For large general contractors managing multiple legal entities, joint ventures and complex ownership structures, intercompany reconciliations can consume a full week of finance team time each month. Workday reduces reconciliations to hitting a button.
The platform has built-in guardrails that automatically handle intercompany transactions and reconciliations. And when something doesn't tie out, Workday's AI-powered anomaly detection flags it immediately, pointing you to exactly where the issue occurred.
This can be transformational in terms of efficiency gains as it frees up your finance team to focus on analysis and strategy instead of hunting down reconciliation errors.
Workday gives you real-time visibility into project costs, cash flow and profitability so you can make decisions based on current data, not stale reports.
See your entire workforce — current assignments, certifications, skills, availability — in one place. Automatically match workers to projects. Manage union requirements and certified payroll.
Integrate Workday with tools like Procore while keeping financial and workforce data in a single source of truth.
Leverage Workday’s AI for predictive forecasting, anomaly detection and alerts that flag issues before they become costly problems.
Automate compliance with union rules, certified payroll, OSHA requirements and state labor laws.
Streamline onboarding so workers can be hired on an iPad in minutes and ready for payroll the same day.
Track project costs in real time to identify overruns early and protect your margins.
Close your books in days, not weeks.
Speed up your invoice-to-cash cycle. Workday streamlines billing so you get reimbursed faster for upfront labor and material costs.
Expand into new states, larger projects or acquisitions without outgrowing your systems. Workday scales with you.
Construction companies don't operate in isolation. You need your ERP to work seamlessly with specialized tools designed for your industry.
The most common integration is with construction management platforms like Procore, which has a native connector with Workday, making the integration straightforward. The key principle: keep your project managers in the tools they knowand love while ensuring all financial and workforce data flows back to Workday as the central source of truth.
This means PMs don't need to become accounting experts or learn a new ERP interface. They stay in their specialized tool and the data integration happens behind the scenes.
Union requirements and certified payroll create unique compliance needs. Workday integrates with specialized certified payroll platforms to ensure you meet all regulatory and union requirements without manual data entry or duplicate systems.
Many construction firms use GPS-based systems (think Apple AirTags for equipment) to track heavy machinery, tools and materials across job sites. These systems integrate with Workday to provide visibility into asset location and utilization.
For specialty contractors, field service management tools coordinate who needs to be where, with which tools and materials. These integrate with Workday to ensure workforce scheduling and logistics align with project needs and payroll processing.
One of the most complex decisions in a Workday transformation is handling in-flight projects. You may be 36 months into a 48-month project when you decide to modernize your systems. That raises a critical question: Do you migrate that data into Workday or leave it behind?
For many firms, the instinct is to bring everything forward. But migrating multi-year projects means moving hundreds of subcontractor invoices, layered retainage structures, change orders and work-in-progress calculations, all of which must reconcile cleanly in the new environment. The stakes are high, and a misstep can disrupt reporting, billing or compliance.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, there are strategic pathways:
The right path depends on your portfolio, regulatory landscape and long-term reporting strategy.
The value of modernization becomes clear in the numbers. From faster closes to improved cash flow and scalable growth, you can realize tangible returns shortly after deployment.
Accelerated Close Cycles: Month-end close can be reduced from 2 to 3 weeks down to 5 days soon after go-live. That's not a marginal improvement, it's transformational, freeing your finance teams to focus on analysis instead of data gathering.
Faster Cash Flow: Streamlined invoicing processes get bills out faster, improving your cash flow at a time when every day matters.
Simplified Workforce Management: The rapid onboarding capability reduces new hire processing from 45 to 60 minutes down to 10 minutes. For companies hiring dozens of workers at once for a new project, that's massive time savings.
Scalability for Growth: Companies expanding into new states, taking on larger projects or pursuing acquisitions find that Workday scales seamlessly.
Modernization starts with clarity. The first step is an honest assessment of your current state. Where are the friction points? For many companies, the warning signs are clear: prolonged month-end closes, manual reconciliations, disconnected systems, compliance complexity and limited visibility into project performance.
But identifying pain isn’t enough. The conversation must move from frustration to quantification.
At that point, the focus shifts from replacement to transformation. Workday is an opportunity to rethink how you structure your chart of accounts, manage approvals, track costs and oversee your workforce. The technology enables modernization, but real value comes from redesigning processes to support the business you intend to become.
From there, it’s about putting a plan in motion. Start by assessing your readiness. Do you have executive alignment, internal capacity and a genuine appetite for change? Consider starting with a focused pilot or readiness engagement or testing a defined use case such as post-project close, rapid workforce onboarding or intercompany reconciliation to demonstrate value before committing to full transformation.
And choose your partner carefully. Construction complexity demands more than software expertise. The right advisor understands your industry, speaks your language and guides both the technical implementation and the operational change.
The construction industry will continue to evolve. Costs will also fluctuate. Labor will likely remain constrained. Competition will intensify. Modernization is no longer optional. The real decision is how you’ll approach it — proactively or reactively.
Implementing Workday requires a partner who understands both construction accounting and the realities of how your business operates. Without that dual expertise, gaps in retainage, work-in-progress tracking, intercompany accounting and workforce management can undermine value from day one. Discover how Armanino’s construction-focused Workday specialists combine industry expertise and platform knowledge to help you configure smarter, streamline operations and maximize your investment.
Learn more about implementing Workday or how to continue the journey to the next phase with your existing Workday platform. Reach out to our Workday experts to build your Workday roadmap and maximize your technology investment.
