It is late at night. The office is quiet. The glow of your computer screen flickers in the dark. You have been staring at the same spreadsheet for hours, cell after cell filled with numbers, cities, and per diem rates.
Rows upon rows of data. Hundreds of locations. Each one needing to match the latest GSA table. You tell yourself, “It’s fine. We uploaded the new rates months ago.” But deep down, you feel that familiar sense of dread.
It almost feels like a never-ending loop. Just when you finally finish one update, after hours of downloading, mapping, and double checking, another one appears. A new fiscal quarter, a new location change, or a new adjustment from GSA. The moment you close the spreadsheet; you can already feel the next update lurking around the corner. You stare at your screen and think to yourself, there has to be a better way.
For anyone working in finance, payroll, or grants administration within an organization that receives federal funding, this story hits uncomfortably close to home.
Every year in October, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) updates per diem rates for travel, lodging, meals, and incidental expenses. These rates can change multiple times a year, and not just across states, but between cities, counties, and even seasons.
For teams managing expenses in Workday, that means every rate change must be reflected in the system to stay compliant with federal reimbursement guidelines.
Sounds simple, right?
Except it is not.
Maintaining GSA rate tables in Workday is a manual, repetitive, and high stakes process. It involves downloading updated files from GSA, reformatting them, mapping each rate to the correct location, uploading them through EIBs, verifying data accuracy, and repeating the process every time throughout the remainder of the year based on the seasonal changes.
If you are managing data for hundreds of employees or dozens of cost centers, the work adds up fast. What should be a simple system update becomes a time-consuming cycle of downloads, uploads, and validations, each step introducing the potential for human error.
And when those errors go unnoticed? That is when the horror begins.
Imagine it is audit season. You are feeling good. Your team worked hard to get everything in order, every rate table, every expense report.
Then an auditor walks in with a question.
“Can you confirm that these reimbursements align with the current GSA per diem rates?”
You nod. You open your system. You check the data. And then, your heart sinks.
The rates are outdated.
You missed the October update.
That small oversight can quickly snowball into a major compliance issue. Incorrect or outdated per diem reimbursements mean your organization could be out of compliance with federal travel regulations, risking findings that can delay or even jeopardize federal funding.
For universities, government contractors, and public sector organizations, that is not a small risk. That is the nightmare scenario. It is not just about correcting the numbers; it is about lost trust, extra audits, and rework that eats up staff time and resources.
And the worst part?
You cannot explain it away by saying, “We just did not have time to update the tables.” Because compliance is not optional.
Let’s be honest, no one gets into finance or grants management because they love spreadsheets. But for teams managing GSA rates, spreadsheets have become a necessary evil.
It is like a bad sequel to a movie you did not want to watch the first time.
And for organizations that try to automate the process through custom integrations, the story is not much better. Those integrations are costly to build and even harder to maintain. GSA can change file formats or update endpoints at any time, breaking the integration and forcing IT to step in again.
Workday customers have said:
With over a decade’s worth of questions and requests for enhancements on Workday Community, it is clear that customers are hoping for a better way.
This constant cycle drains productivity, creates anxiety around audits, and ties up teams who could be working on more strategic projects.
It is the kind of behind-the-scenes frustration that every Workday customer understands, and most have simply learned to live with.
Until now.
We built GSA RateSync to break that cycle.
GSA RateSync is a headless Workday Orchestrate app that automates the entire process of maintaining GSA rate tables. It connects directly to official GSA data sources, pulls the most recent rates, and keeps them synchronized in Workday, all without a single manual upload.
Think of it as the automated guardian of your compliance.
The result?
No more late-night uploads.
No more audit panic.
No more haunted spreadsheets.
Just clean, current, and compliant data, always in sync.
Before GSA RateSync, teams were spending hours each quarter managing manual updates. Some organizations estimated they spent the equivalent of two full workweeks each year just maintaining rate tables. Others built integrations that cost more to maintain than the problem they solved.
Now, with RateSync, that work disappears.
Finance teams can focus on analysis, not administration. Grants managers can sleep easier knowing their reimbursements are accurate. Auditors can trace every update to its official source. CIOs can finally say goodbye to the patchwork of manual processes and one-off integrations that bog down system performance.
Customers can also rest assured that their data will stay current because the app is fully managed and maintained by The Groove. Our team continuously monitors GSA updates, system performance, and data accuracy to ensure every connection remains reliable and secure. There is no need for customers to rebuild integrations or worry about changing file formats. With The Groove managing GSA RateSync behind the scenes, organizations can trust that their compliance process will always keep pace with the latest GSA data.
This is not just automation; it is peace of mind.
With GSA RateSync, your rates are always accurate, your audits are always ready, and your nights are no longer haunted by fear of spreadsheets gone wrong. You can approach auditors with confidence, not anxiety, and your organization can maintain compliance without the stress.
The true horror story? Doing it all by hand. The endless copying, pasting, and formatting that drains time, resources, and morale.
Sleep soundly. Let GSA RateSync take over the tedious, error-prone work so you can reclaim control, confidence, and a little peace of mind.
Because at the end of the day, compliance doesn’t have to be scary—unless you’re still doing it manually.
Learn more about GSA RateSync on Workday Marketplace:
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