Following a successful initial public offering (IPO) in October, cloud application provider Workday has updated its Workday Financial Management platform, which is designed to help organizations better manage their global financial operations.

Workday officials said the updated version – Workday 18 – offers “deeper engagement, drive pay for performance, and prepare talent for the future, while also giving organizations greater flexibility they need to configure Workday to meet business needs.”

New capabilities of Workday 18 include enhanced tax and payment support, expanded reporting and grant management, helping global organizations more efficiently manage their finances, according to Stan Swete, chief technology officer at Workday.

“Workday 18 adds critical capabilities global organizations need to manage their finances in the cloud and across geographies,” Swete said in a company statement. “By continuing to tightly unify Financial Management with Workday HCM and adding more mobile, collaboration, and analytics features to our applications, enterprises have more flexibility and visibility into their organizations than ever before with one enterprise cloud solution.”

Workday touted several advancements to Workday Financial Management, including the following:

Enhanced global tax and payment support gives customers the ability to support partial tax recoverability and tax regimes with mixed recoverable and non-recoverable tax rates, while enriched international payment formats provide greater and more efficient reach to different regions.

Expanded reporting using Worktags on dimensions such as Division or Business Unit provides even more flexible real-time reporting for multi-national organizations.

Project scenario planning leverages Workday’s unified HCM and Financial Management applications, so that managers can allocate resources seamlessly across projects with details that include cost, worker availability, skills, and experience.

Grants Management and fund accounting for education and government organizations deliver clear visibility into grant activity, improved compliance with grantor reporting requirements and enable the monitoring of the use of funds to help ensure they are segregated appropriately.

Last month, shares of Workday rocketed 74 percent higher in a red-hot trading debut for the cloud software company following its $637 million IPO, a successful launch for the biggest high-tech IPO since Facebook (News - Alert).

The $28 IPO pricing was well above the price the company had indicated just days earlier. When Workday filed in August to go public, it said it hoped its IPO would raise $400 million, much less than the $637 million it ended up raising.

Workday was founded in 2005 by former PeopleSoft executives Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield, who departed the similar company after it was acquired by Redwood City software giant Oracle (News - Alert). The company offers human-resources software stored on its own servers, a popular offering known as cloud software and Software- as- a- Service, or SaaS.