Mike WernertWorkday Field Notes.
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Guides & troubleshooting
AbsenceTime off accrual is not calculating
Work through the plan, eligibility, period schedule, and accrual calculation before changing configuration.
What to check
- Confirm the worker, effective date, and expected accrual period.
- Check eligibility and plan assignment on that date.
- Review time off plan, accrual, and period schedule dependencies.
- Check accrual frequency, limits, overrides, and relevant absence events.
- Reproduce with a synthetic worker in a nonproduction tenant before changing rules.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
AbsenceCarryover balance looks wrong
A year-end carryover difference can come from schedule dates, limits, expiration rules, or effective dating.
What to check
- Confirm plan year and carryover calculation date.
- Compare source balance with carried amount and applicable limits.
- Check carryover expiration and any prior adjustments.
- Review effective-dated plan changes and worker eligibility.
- Validate against a known-good synthetic example.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
AbsenceLeave of absence eligibility issue
Separate leave type eligibility from approval workflow and security visibility.
What to check
- Confirm the intended leave type, worker status, and relevant dates.
- Check eligibility conditions and any restrictions.
- Inspect the related business process and required approval steps.
- Compare what the requester sees with what an authorized administrator sees.
- Document the precise failing condition before changing configuration.
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ReportingRaaS report is missing workers
Check the report data source, report filters, prompts, and the executing identity’s data access.
What to check
- Identify the exact report and the user or integration system user running it.
- Compare row counts in the report preview and web-service output.
- Review report data source, source filters, and prompts.
- Check domain security and organizational constraints on the executing identity.
- Test a single known synthetic worker and inspect field-level security.
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ReportingCalculated field returns blank
A blank result may reflect business-object context, related instances, security, or date behavior.
What to check
- Confirm the business object and field type.
- Inspect the related business object chain and cardinality.
- Test with a known input and explicit effective date.
- Check security on the underlying fields.
- Evaluate null handling and report-specific versus tenant-wide scope.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
ReportingCustom report is slow
Narrow the record set and review data-source selection before optimizing presentation.
What to check
- Capture runtime and approximate result size.
- Review indexed versus nonindexed data source options where applicable.
- Use available prompts and source filtering early.
- Inspect calculated fields and related object expansion.
- Compare execution under representative security contexts.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
IntegrationsOutbound EIB ran but file never arrived
An integration event can finish without successful downstream document delivery. Investigate the stages separately.
What to check
- Review the integration event and available output documents.
- Inspect delivery event or transport details independently of generation.
- Confirm endpoint, path, credentials, host key, and connection method with the authorized owner.
- Check retry behavior, schedules, and downstream receipt logs.
- Share sanitized event IDs and timing, never credentials or real worker data.
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IntegrationsIntegration missed a worker change
Differentiate effective-dated data changes, integration selection criteria, and change-detection timing.
What to check
- Confirm the relevant effective and entry dates.
- Review the integration run window and launch parameters.
- Check selection criteria and worker eligibility.
- Examine audit output for whether the field was evaluated as changed.
- Test a controlled record change in a sandbox.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
IntegrationsPGP versus SFTP: what solves what?
SFTP secures transport; PGP secures the file payload. Authentication and encryption keys have different roles.
What to check
- Map the sending and receiving system and who owns each endpoint.
- Identify whether the issue is transport authentication or payload encryption.
- For PGP, confirm the sender has the recipient’s public key and the recipient holds the private key.
- For SFTP, confirm username, host verification, and authorized SSH credentials.
- Test with dummy files before exchanging production data.
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IntegrationsBuilding an integration support inventory
Good integration governance starts with owners, data scope, run schedules, and a known escalation path.
What to check
- Inventory system name, business purpose, source and destination.
- Record business owner, technical owner, vendor, and support contact.
- Capture transport, authentication type, schedule, and environment without storing secrets.
- Track data classification, monitoring method, and known dependencies.
- Review stale integrations and unowned dependencies regularly.
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SecurityISU cannot access a report or API
Access can depend on security-group membership, domain policies, business-process security, and the call context.
What to check
- Confirm the exact executing integration system user or API client.
- Identify which operation or report is failing and the relevant domain.
- Review group membership and applicable constraints.
- Verify pending security policy changes were activated if required.
- Test the smallest permission change in nonproduction and document approval.
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SecurityConstrained proxy access: design considerations
A proxy policy should reflect least privilege and the exact nonproduction testing need.
What to check
- Confirm the environment supports the required proxy feature.
- Define permitted personas, target users, and restrictions.
- Review relevant policies, approvals, and audit visibility.
- Test allowed and denied scenarios in a nonproduction tenant.
- Avoid including privileged HR data unless explicitly authorized.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
SecurityWhy a user cannot view a worker document
Document visibility may involve document categories, worker context, and security configuration.
What to check
- Identify the affected document category and the expected access role.
- Verify who owns the document and its worker/context association.
- Review category restrictions and applicable domain permissions.
- Test with sanitized document examples and a comparable role.
- Use security audits before making broad permission changes.
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PayrollPayroll result differs from expectation
Compare inputs, period context, earning/deduction eligibility, and retro activity before assuming a calculation defect.
What to check
- Identify the pay period, pay group, and pay result type.
- Compare payroll inputs and effective dates.
- Inspect earning or deduction eligibility, calculations, and limits.
- Check retro results, off-cycle processing, and relevant absence or time inputs.
- Reconcile a test example and obtain payroll owner approval before changes.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
PayrollPayroll integration totals do not reconcile
Differentiate population, effective-date, mapping, and delivery problems from calculation issues.
What to check
- Compare the source and target population definitions.
- Reconcile employee identifiers, earning/deduction codes, and period boundaries.
- Review mapping tables and expected totals.
- Inspect rejected records and transport acknowledgement separately.
- Validate adjustments with payroll and downstream owners.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
HCMSupervisory organizations and hiring dependencies
Organization design affects staffing, security, reporting, and integration outputs.
What to check
- Confirm organization hierarchy and management ownership.
- Review staffing model, positions, and hiring restrictions.
- Map job profile and organization dependencies for data loads.
- Check the business process/security context for changes.
- Test downstream reports and interfaces after structural updates.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
HCMHire and rescind across connected systems
Treat a rescind as an end-to-end event, not simply a local transaction reversal.
What to check
- Identify the Workday business process and whether rescind or correction occurred.
- Trace downstream events and message timing.
- Compare hire/worker status at each system boundary.
- Check idempotency or duplicate handling in receiving systems.
- Document approved recovery steps and accountable owners.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
ExtendWhen should you use Workday Extend?
Evaluate app design, security boundaries, workflow fit, and maintenance before reaching for custom development.
What to check
- Define the missing user experience or business capability.
- Check standard Workday configuration and existing workflows first.
- Identify data access, roles, and approval requirements.
- Estimate support, upgrade, and ownership expectations.
- Prototype using nonproduction and synthetic data.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
ExtendExtend app access and least privilege
App-level access decisions should align with tenant security and minimize exposed worker information.
What to check
- List each persona and the data they genuinely need.
- Define actions versus read-only access.
- Map back-end authorization separately from screen visibility.
- Test unauthorized attempts and negative scenarios.
- Record approvals and a repeatable review process.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
OrchestrateOrchestrate integration design checklist
Before building, write the integration contract, authentication model, error behavior, and reprocessing plan.
What to check
- Document the trigger, input, and desired outcome.
- Identify Workday API, RaaS, WQL, or third-party endpoints required.
- Plan least-privilege authorization and credential storage.
- Design validation, branching, logging, retries, and failure notification.
- Define idempotency and replay behavior; test with synthetic records.
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StudioWorkday Studio assembly troubleshooting
Find the failing step and distinguish upstream data, transformation, and outbound delivery.
What to check
- Locate the integration event and relevant assembly component.
- Use sanitized logs to identify the last completed step.
- Check transport settings and transformations independently.
- Reproduce with a minimal synthetic payload.
- Verify failure handling, recovery path, and monitoring.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
PrismPrism dataset pipeline troubleshooting
Look at ingestion, schema, transformation stages, sharing, and publication as separate stages.
What to check
- Confirm external or Workday input data type and file layout.
- Inspect tables/datasets and schema changes.
- Check transformation stage outputs on sample rows.
- Review sharing and published data source security.
- Confirm publish schedule and report freshness.
Original field note · Checklist for investigation · Validate in your tenant.
Workday documentation
These field notes are original checklists. For configuration details, confirm against the maintained Workday documentation and the version available to you.
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