Glossary of Terms

A user-defined type that you assign to each employee when the employee is hired. For the most part this designation is informational only; you can search or filter employees by their employee type. However, you can designate a type as Fixed Term Employees, and employees of that type have fixed end dates of employment.

A set of one or more integration templates that provides a framework for building integrations in a particular functional area. For example, Workday Payroll Interface is an integration connector. Unlike packaged integrations, an integration connector does not have a named endpoint.

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.

A group of one or more pay group/run category combinations that share the same period schedule. In the Run Pay Calculation task, you can start a payroll processing run for multiple pay groups as a single action when they are part of the same pay run group.

A single leave of absence taken as separate blocks of time. To facilitate tracking, you can coordinate time offs with leaves of absence. Validation rules and supporting data for coordinated leaves and time offs can reference combined balances. For example, eligibility and validation rules can check to see if an employee has a sufficient balance across coordinated leave types and time offs to take all days in a leave of absence or time off request.

The period of time, such as current period, month-to-date, quarter-to-date, or year-to-date, over which Workday calculates a pay component value.

See Time Entry Validation.

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.

Identifies the benefit plans, coverage targets, and coverage amounts that employees receive by default when they do not complete an enrollment event.

An organization refers to a grouping used to organize people, resources, workers, and other organizations. Organizations provide management, visibility into, and reporting (roll-up) structures for resource allocation. Organizations can be defined for application uses like defining departmental hierarchies, project teams, etc. They can also be used to define cost centers and geographic or regional reporting structures.

Rates, units, amounts, or other values that you enter manually or load into Workday Payroll for a worker's on-cycle or offcycle run. Sometimes referred to as worker input.

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

A grouping of compensation guidelines (grades, grade profiles, and their associated steps) and plans that you can assign to workers as a set. Packages provide a quick view the eligible plans for a particular job or group of employees.

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.

Defines rules for entering and tracking one or more related time offs. Identifies the unit of time (hours or days), eligibility requirements, whether to track balances, and if time offs are position-based or worker-based. Time off plans that track balances also specify the balance period (plan year), accruals that add to the plan balance, carryover limits, and other balance tracking rules.

A type of transaction entered for a prior period, for which Workday cannot automatically recalculate employee earnings and deductions. Workday identifies these transactions for you, so that you can manually enter the necessary adjustments.

Usually represents a legal entity, and is the primary entity for recorded business transactions and financial reports. A Workday company equates to a single tax ID within an enterprise. A company is a type of Workday organization.

Any event that results in a gain or loss of benefits coverage. This encompasses both open enrollment and benefit events, such as a new hire, a termination, the birth of a child, and a job change. For each event, you must specify the benefit plans and elections that become available or are lost to employees as the result of that event. For example, you can make medical, dental, basic life, supplemental life, and visions plans available to new hires; by contrast, for the birth of a child, you might make only basic life, supplemental life, and medical coverage available to affected employees.

Indicates the type of data that Workday will receive from or export to an external system and its location. Workday supports five types of data sources including attachments, external files, standard reports, custom reports, and REST endpoints.

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 annual budget for planned compensation for a position. Spend and projected spend for the position can be tracked against the budget.

The collection of user-defined job family groups, which each contain job families, which each contain job families, available for use in hiring and other staffing transactions.

The smallest unit of compensation for a worker in a specific position. Workday uses compensation elements to determine the amount, currency, frequency, and other attributes of a worker’s compensation. • Compensation elements are linked to compensation plans. For example, Base Pay, Car Allowance, and Commission can be mapped to any compensation plan, but not to merit plans. • A Compensation Element Group is a collection of compensation elements. For example, the group Standard Base Pay can be composed of multiple compensation elements. Compensation elements do not need to be grouped, and groups are optional. • Payroll earning codes linked to a compensation element allow Workday Payroll and Payroll Interface to include the applicable compensation in payroll. See the Compensation Element tab on Create Earning.

A seven-day period defined by a worker's start day of week and day breaker. By default, begins on Sunday at midnight and ends on the following Saturday at 11:59 PM; however, this can be configured for a group of workers through the use of work schedule calendars. Used for time entry and time calculations.

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

An event in the employee's life that gives the employee the opportunity to change benefit elections. These include staffing changes (for example, getting hired or promoted) but also "life events," for example, getting married or having a new child.

Events that result from the passage of time rather than from a specific change to employee data. For example, you can set up a passive event to track and manage benefit eligibility for employees who reach the age of 65 (retirement age). Based on the event rules, Workday automatically searches for employees turning 65 and generates an enrollment event to record any benefit gains or losses.

Defines whether the worker is paid a salary or a certain amount per unit of time, for example, hourly or weekly. Defined by country and associated with job profiles and, by extension, with employees in that job profile.

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.

A component of pay that you use to assign monetary amounts to a worker's pay. For example, a salary, an allowance, or a bonus. Some compensation plans, for example, a commission, are discretionary. You are not paid from these compensation plans in every paycheck. By contrast, other plans, like a salary plan, are included in every paycheck.