Glossary of Terms

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.

View is the ability to see objects or data through the Workday user interface, when permitted in a domain security policy.

Ability to extend Workday business objects by creating custom object definitions based on the business object and adding custom fields. Custom objects enable you to record additional data for which there’s no Workday-delivered field. - Business objects are used to store data in Workday (such as organizations or workers). A business object has fields and instances, which are analogous to rows and columns in a spreadsheet.

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

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

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.

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.

Definable worktags that you can associate with people or financial transactions. You can: (1) Automatically populate a custom organization as a worktag into transactions that involve a worker by making the worker a member of the custom organization. (2) Use custom organizations as worktags to route transactions to specific people based on role.

A job-based security group includes one or more job-related attributes or objects including job profile, job family, job category, management level, or exempt/non-exempt status.

Roles define a group of people with specific responsibilities and permissions. When a business process runs, the role for each step includes all of the workers in that role in the business process target organization.

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

Several dashboards are delivered with a number of worklets pre-configured that are specific to a functional area, like Talent Management or Workforce Planning. Since these worklets are built with the report writer and report-specific calculated fields, you can copy and modify them if you have unique requirements. You can add additional custom worklets to these dashboards using the report writer.

Custom reports are designed and built by customers using the Workday Report Writer. They can be created new or as a copy of another standard or custom report.

Landing pages display a collection of different worklets to enable you to quickly view data and perform tasks. There are different landing pages and display formats (grid or wheel) to support different functions. Some common landing pages are My Workday, My Workday 2.0, All About Me, and My Team. There are other specialized landing pages, such as dashboard landing pages.

A securable item is an action, report, or data that is part of a security policy. You can secure access by defining the security policy to restrict access to the item to specified security groups. Related securable items are grouped into domains. Also, business-process-related actions are securable items.

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.

A data source defines a particular set of business object instances for reporting purposes. A data source is similar to a database view, except it is more flexible in two key areas. First, a database view always returns a flattened out tabular data structure, whereas a data source can return hierarchical data structures. Second, a database view requires that technical staff manually join related tables together, while a data source automatically allows reportable access to all business objects related to those in the data source.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can create 3 types of custom reports: simple, advanced, and matrix. An advanced report provides all the features of a simple report, plus more advanced ones such as accessing related business objects and producing multiple levels of headings and subtotals. Advanced reports also enable the use of sub-filters, run time prompts, charts, worklets, and report sharing, and provide the ability to expose the report as a web service.

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.

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

An aggregation security group is one whose members are other security groups. Workers associated with any included security group are granted access through an aggregation security group.

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.

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.