Workday is an excellent system that brings every organisation’s financial, IT and human capital management requirements into a single platform.

Biannually, Workday delivers new features. It does this in two ways:

  • Weekly service updates
  • Feature releases

The feature’s release is delivered typically every March and September.

Release Themes:

Compliance:

Workday feature release based on themes corresponds to rapid response to regulatory and compliance changes. Government changes can be sudden and difficult to manage and therefore, weekly service update and feature release based on compliance enables the Workday user to remain in line with the government changes. Workday can make updates to support new and changing laws in the preview tenant, verify with customers that they are working as intended, and then turn on those changes in production.

  1. Financial Controls on Operational Transactions: Through this feature, financial controls can be changed and approved operational transactions can be prevented from being altered. This will provide a better audit trail when reconciling ledger balances to operational transactions and thus, reduces risks and adheres to compliance.
  2. Tax Declarations Groups: Workday allows to create tax declarations by Value Added Tax (VAT) group. This will help minimize manual effort and ensure adherence to compliance and regulations.
  3. Cancel Draft Tax Declarations: Workday feature allows for tax declaration cancellation at draft status. As a result, the user can correct invoices or modify transactions. In addition to this, Workday allows to delete or cancel tax declarations as well as retain necessary tax declarations.
  4. Section 3 for Record of External Form I-9: Workday enables you to complete Section 3 on a Record of External Form I-9, making it easier for the user to track workers’ forms in Workday and meet regulatory requirements.
  5. Candidate Profile Data Report: Workday enables obtaining candidate information to help meet regulatory requirements.
  6. Multiple Replacement Payments: Creation of replacement payments for multiple subperiods within a pay period is possible with Workday. This helps you in eliminating the need for manual processing and other workarounds.

Experience:

Workday is all about receiving customer feedback and enhancing customer experience. With Workday, the continuous development of features enhances the customer experience and avoids regressions. Workday features are released based on the theme of efficiency where the major focus is on product management, development, and QA on improving functionalities (or creating new ones) and underlying supporting technologies. Therefore, Workday is all about making the customer/user experience better.

  1. Bank Account Creation: Workday further allows for the creation of worker bank accounts. This will ensure better accuracy in bank payment information and reduce manual entry.
  2. Print Attachments with Customer Invoices: With Workday, the user will be able to include attachments from an expense transaction and customer invoice document on 1 PDF file for easier printing and emailing. This will eliminate the need to download each attachment on an expense report and manually upload it to the invoice.
  3. Receipt Scanning for Mobile Expenses: To enhance customer experience, Workday provides services on Android, iPad, and iPhone. This enables the user to scan receipts for the Merchant attribute so you can quickly report expenses through Workday.
  4. Transfer Pricing for Expenses: Manual workload is a hassle and therefore, Workday enables improvement in intercompany transactions by eliminating manual pricing and calculations for expense transactions. Furthermore, Workday allows the configuration of default spending categories and worktags for non-purchase order invoice lines based on the supplier, reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy.
  5. Safety Incident Tracking: Workday enables the collection of data for safety incidents report. The system introduces improvements to safety incident tracking.
  6. Start and End Times on Time Off: Workday allows users to include start and end times for workers’ time off which can be optional. This helps managers know when the day the worker will be taking time off to better plan for absences within teams.

Insight:

  1. Integration of Adaptive Insights: Integration of Adaptive Insights into Workday is an extremely beneficial feature. This is the first step in a multi-phase effort that will enable you to integrate Adaptive Insights headcount and financials planning and advanced modelling into your Workday experience. This allows the user to import data from Workday Financials and Human Capital Management (HCM) to Adaptive Insights and then retrieve it back from Adaptive Insights to Workday. Workday worklets provide easy navigation between Workday and Adaptive Insights.
  2. Unify Cash Forecasting and Cash Positioning: Cash is an important part of an organisation. Therefore, Workday released a feature that allows for cash forecast outlines to generate cash position reports. This also allows for the visualisation of the prior day and intraday cash positions in a more organised and structured way.
  3. Improvement of User Interface for Financial Plan and Redesign for Projects: Workday introduces redesigns in the financial plans that enable the better progression of projects and reduce project cost risks. Furthermore, it retrieves cost performance data.
  4. New integration for Job Requisition Prioritization Integration: Workday delivers a new integration for IBM Watson that enables the user to send job requisitions to IBM. As a result, this allows the user to obtain a priority and complexity for each job requisition according to IBM Watson analysis.
  5. Payroll Effective Change Interface Data Audit: Workday is continuously improving the process of audit and reconciling payroll by delivering a new searchable audit report, making it easier for the organisation to visualise the data changes created by payroll integration events.
  6. Applicants Recruitment Ratings: As an employer, you will be able to configure a range of scores for applicant prospects, improving how you target your recruiting efforts.
  7. Candidate Application GPA: Many organisations require a record of the employee’s educational details. With Workday, the user will be able to define the educational details including GPAs and other obtained scores. This will enable you to include additional data in the admissions process, helping you make more informed decisions when evaluating applications.
  8. Improvement in the Request Framework: Workday versions are released with a request framework by enhancing the configuration of requests. This allows the user to submit, track, approve, and audit requests for new or changed student data within Workday.
  9. Worksheets: One of the major enhancements of Workday is the Worksheets where the analysing and ability to share data is improved. This is done by enabling sharing of data in a familiar spreadsheet environment.

Trust/Operational Excellence:

  1. Time Zones: A large organisation may have workers in different time zones. Workday enhancements allow the organisation to maintain data for workers in different time zones. This new improvement adds accuracy to business process routing, data management and security groups, thus forging trust within the employees.
  2. Work Schedule Calendars: Work Schedule Calendars make it effective and easier for the user to organize and manage work schedules by delivering enhancements including the ability to define tasks and the ability to create schedule patterns.
  3. Payroll Forward Accruals: Workday has introduced new configuration options, making it easier for the organisation to exclude employer-paid deductions from forward accruals.

New Features and Enhancements in Workday 2023 Release 1 (2023R1)

Like every Workday release, the Workday 2023R1 release focuses on back-end improvements and a few large-scale changes, including:

  1. New “Time off Balance” Reports: Workday has improved on their report delivering service. Through this, employees can identify when they might be at risk for forfeiting certain Time Off hours (like Discretionary Time Off, Personal Holiday Time Off or when a classified employee is nearing their 240-hour Vacation Time Off accrual limit).
  2. More Flexibility and Customization for Period Activity Payments: This feature enables the unit administrators to customize Period Activity Payment dollar and hour amounts for all pay periods within the payment range (rather than being required to use the equal-distribution default amounts set by the system). In addition to this, the feature provides more options for managing Period Activity Pay for future-dated staffing changes.
  3. Enhancement of the One-Time Payments feature: This feature improvement benefits both the unit administrators and employees. With this feature, when unit administrators request a One-Time Payment, Workday displays the specific date (i.e., payday) the payment will be paid to the employee.

In conclusion, Workday features are introduced and enhanced twice yearly to ensure customer feedback and suggestions are integrated to enhance the user journey.

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