Glossary of Terms

A compact report displayed as a "tile" on the My Workday page, providing easy access to tasks and information you use on a regular basis. Examples are My Leadership Roles, Open Positions, Anniversaries, and so on.

Designated participants in business processes, with a defined responsibility in this type of event, indicate that they deny the proposed action The business process is not authorized to proceed to the next step. In some cases, the entire business process may be terminated, and all Workday data is restored to its state before the business process started.

A location membership security group is one whose members are any workers assigned to that location.

A security group is a collection of users, or a collection of objects that are related to users. Allowing a security group access to a securable item in a security policy grants access to the users associated with the security group.

You can assign positions to organization roles. Depending on your staffing model, a position may or may not necessarily have a worker specified.

A named attribute that you can assign to events and objects to indicate their business purpose. For example, you can create a Customer worktag, whose values are the names of your customers. You can use the worktag to assign a customer to an expense in an expense report or a product sales event.

Roles can be assigned to a user when he is given a responsibility within a functional area, such as HR partner or compensation partner for a particular organization. You can have different roles in relationship to different organizations. For example, you could be a compensation partner for one organization and an HR business partner for another organization.

You can create 3 types of custom reports: simple, advanced, and matrix. A matrix report forms the foundation for custom analytics. It summarizes data by one or two fields that contain repeating values. The resulting matrix is displayed as either a table or chart that users can drill through to see the associated details. You control the specific detail data users should see when they drill down by selecting the desired fields when defining the report. Matrix reports also provide features such as filtering, run time prompts, worklets and report sharing.

A security segment is a grouping of related securable items, such as pay components, that can be secured together using a segment-based security group for that segment.

Workday stores your data as business objects—organizations, workers, positions, and so on—which can be thought of as database tables or worksheets in Excel. Just as a database table or worksheet has columns and rows, a Workday business object has fields and instances. A business object is composed of a set of related fields, similar to how a table or spreadsheet is composed of a set of related columns. Instances of a business object in Workday are like rows in a table or spreadsheet, with each instance representing a unique occurrence of that type of object such as an organization or worker. A business object can have no instances, one instance, or many instances. Workday automatically links related business objects together. For example, purchase order lines are linked to a purchase order header, the purchase order header is linked to a supplier, the supplier is linked to a company, and so on.

Some aspect of or perspective on data that you want to use as the basis for analysis. For example, for financial accounting, you can analyze revenue by customer, by channel, or by marketing campaign. For expenses, you can analyze costs by cost center or by project. All of these are dimensions. Dimensions are usually created with worktags.

Modify is an action through the Workday user interface that can be permitted on securable items in a domain security policy. It includes view permission.

A custom report that can be used by users other than the user who created the report. Can be shared by user, group or security role. Reports must be shared to use are worklets

The set of tasks that need to be completed for an event to occur, the order in which they must be done, and who must do them. Workday includes a number of predefined business processes for different purposes. You can edit the default definitions for your organization. You can also create different versions of the same business process for different organizations.

A domain is a collection of related securable items such as actions, reports, report data, report data sources, or custom report fields. Each domain is secured by a domain security policy.

The My Workday landing page displays a grid of worklets such as Inbox and My Requests. You should enable My Workday only for administrator and professional roles, not for Employee Self Service or Manager Self Service. Workday recommends that you keep the number of worklets on My Workday to a minimum. The number of worklets on My Workday affects display performance.

You can create 3 types of custom reports: simple, advanced, and matrix. A simple report provides straightforward design options for the beginning or occasional user to create reports quickly and easily.

A business process that the initiator has started. For example, the Hire Employee for Organization X business process definition becomes an instance when the initiator uses it to hire a particular applicant.

A domain security policy is a collection of related securable elements of different types and user-specified security groups that have access to elements of each type.

The My Workday 2.0 landing page is home to the Workfeed worklet. It is designed to optimize performance, and therefore is limited to displaying the Workfeed plus 4 additional worklets. This limit ensures that users cannot place a large number of worklets (some of which may be computationally intensive) on a page that is frequently accessed. It is recommended that you use the Dashboard landing pages for additional analytical worklets that users might need.

Standard reports are reports that come delivered with Workday. They are developed by Workday and are delivered to all Workday customers. Depending on the reporting requirements, standard reports may be defined using the Workday Report Writer or in XpressO (Workday's internal development tool). Standard reports that were designed using the Report Writer can be copied to create a custom report and then modified according to your requirements.

A business process security policy secures the initiation step, step actions and process-wide actions including view, rescind, cancel and correct. It specifies which security groups that have access to each action.

Matrix reports enable you to drill down to see underlying data. When you click on a drillable element (such as a drillable field in the table view or a column, line, or pie segment in the chart view), a context menu appears that enables you to select a new View By field. If the Enable Drilldown to Detail Data check box is selected on the Advanced tab of the report definition, you can also select Details associated with the selected report element.

An organization security group is one whose members are any workers assigned to that organization.

Subfields are additional details about a field, like a master/detail relationship. Subfields are used when creating reports using Report Writer.

Canceling a business process stops the workflow in progress and reverses any changes made to Workday data. It is also a securable action in a business process security policy.

A transaction that occurs within your organization, such as hiring or terminating an employee.

When defining a report, the primary business object is the business object returned by the data source.

The object that a business process operates on. For example, for business processes that deal with an employee record, the target is the employee. For business processes that deal with a financial object, such as an accounting journal, the accounting journal is the target. Since the target determines the organization, it controls which business process custom definition Workday uses.

Conditions are one or more logical matches that are resolved to True or False and used to decide if some action should be taken. For example, you can add conditions to steps in a business process to determine if the step should run.