Glossary of Terms

An initiation step is the first step of a business process.

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.

A group of items to be paid (such as supplier invoices and expense reports), and payments (paychecks and ad hoc supplier payments) that is treated as one unit when selecting and settling payments.

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.

Rescinding a business process operates on completed business processes. It completely reverses all changes made to Workday data. It is also a securable action in a business process security policy.

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.

A worker's work location. This value influences many processes, including compensation and staffing.

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.

A template defines how a worker's time entry calendar is configured. Workers are matched to time entry templates through eligibility rules.

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.

Workday provides a special Workfeed worklet modeled on the idea of an activity stream (like activity streams in Facebook and Twitter and many other modern applications). The Workfeed presents an actionable view of content items of interest to you, arranged chronologically. This enables you to see and act on pertinent tasks and content items, from a combination of sources, all presented in a simple time-line view. The Workfeed should be configured as a required worklet on the My Workday 2.0 landing page.

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.

A worker who is not an employee. You can use contingent worker types, such as contractor or consultant, to categorize and track contingent workers in your organization.

15 delivered worktags with configurable names and values. Each custom worktag associates the Worktag Usage with financial, human resource, payroll, or time tracking transactions or data. Optimal when all you need is a simple tag for financial transactions that do not require any capabilities around roll-ups, security assignment, or assigning to workers. Note: custom worktags cannot be used for payroll costing allocations and accounting adjustments.

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.

Companies use a base currency for transactions and reporting. Each company in a tenant can have its own base currency. When a transaction currency is different than the company base currency, the transaction is recorded in the transaction currency and automatically converted to the base currency. You can also define default currencies for customers and suppliers.

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.

An instance refers to one unique occurrence of a business object, for example, your Executive Management organization, or John Doe, the worker.

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 change to the amount a supplier owes and can be an increase or a decrease in the amount due.

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.

A role-based security group specifies one organization role and includes workers in job positions defined for that organization role.

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 maximum amount of time off employees can carry over from one balance period to another.

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 time entry code describes the type of time a worker enters, such as worked time or meal allowance. In order to use time entry codes, you must attach them to time code groups, with the exception of the default time entry code assigned to a time entry template.

Names a type of time off users can request, such as Sick Time or Vacation. This is the name users see when entering a time off request. A time off type can be associated with more than one time off.

Workflow defines who can perfrom each task in a business process and provides a routing mechanism to move the task from one user to another

Used to identify whether, for whom, and what conditions to resolve an earning or deduction. On the Criteria tab of Create Earning and Create Deduction.

See Intermittent Leave.