Workday Platform Admin cheat sheet

Workday HCM groups workers into supervisory organizations; each supervisory organization has a hierarchy and a manager, and staffing transactions route through that hierarchy.

Job management tracks a worker against a job profile without a predefined position; position management adds a defined position with headcount, availability, and position restrictions.

Core staffing business processes include Hire, Add Job, Change Job, Transfer, End Job, and Termination; each is effective-dated and creates a transaction record.

The job catalog consists of job family, job group, job profile, and job level; job profiles carry compensation, skills, and competency requirements.

Position restrictions control whether a position is available to hire, frozen, or closed; restricted positions require position management before a worker can be hired.

Organization types include supervisory, company, cost center, region, and custom organization types; each organization type has its own hierarchy and security behavior.

Tenant setup tasks configure company information, currencies, calendars, holidays, pay groups, and pay cycles before transaction data is loaded.

Effective dating creates future-effective records for future-dated changes; as-of dates determine which record is displayed at any point in time.

Security groups define membership; types include role-based, user-based, job-based, aggregate, segment-based, and integration system groups.

A domain security policy grants permissions such as View, Modify, Get, Put, Approve, or Execute on a data domain to one or more security groups.

Business process security policies control who can initiate, approve, or view each business process type and each approval step.

Role-based groups derive membership from role assignments; role assignment conditions use worker, organization, or other attributes to determine who receives the role.

Aggregate groups combine other groups by intersection, where members must belong to all included groups, or union, where members belong to any included group.

Segment-based groups restrict membership to workers in specified organization, location, pay group, or other segments.

Integration system security groups contain non-worker users used by integrations; they require domain and business process permissions like other groups.

Use View Security for Securable Item and View Security Group to audit effective access for a domain, business process, or group.

Security is additive: a user receives the union of permissions from all groups they belong to, unless a business process step requires a specific approver.

A business process type is configured by a business process definition; steps can be initiation, approval, action, to-do, or completion.

Approval steps define approvers by role, user, group, or security group; the approval requirement can be all approvers, any one approver, or a percentage of approvers.

Routing can be serial or parallel; parallel steps are active at the same time and do not depend on each other's completion order.

Condition rules on a step determine whether the step is included, skipped, or routed to a specific approver group based on transaction data.

Delegation reassigns approvals while a worker is out of office; delegation can be date-bounded and limited to specific roles or business processes.

Business process admin tasks allow reassignment, cancellation, and viewing of in-flight business process instances.

Escalation settings route overdue approvals to a higher-level approver after a configured number of days.

The initiation step controls who can start the business process; the completion step controls final approval and triggers downstream events.

Business process events can trigger notifications, integrations, and calculated field evaluations.

Calculated field types include arithmetic, date, text, true/false, lookup, aggregate, accumulation, extract, and evaluate expression.

A calculated field references fields on a business object; it cannot reference itself and must use valid instance qualifiers.

Aggregate calculated fields count, sum, minimum, maximum, or concatenate values across related multi-instance objects.

Lookup calculated fields return a related object's field value by following a defined relationship path.

Report types include advanced, matrix, composite, search, BIRT, and report as a service; each has different layout and export behavior.

Prompts filter report data at run time; default prompt values can be set per report or through report sharing.

Report security uses the Report securable item and report groups; users need View access to the report and to the underlying data domains.

Composite reports combine multiple sub-reports into one output; matrix reports pivot rows and columns with aggregations.

Report as a service exposes a custom report as a web service endpoint for integrations; output formats include XML, CSV, and JSON.

Integration types include enterprise interface builder, Workday Studio, Cloud Connect, document transformation, report as a service, SOAP/REST web services, and payroll interfaces.

An enterprise interface builder integration is a configurable inbound or outbound integration using a spreadsheet or XML template; it can be scheduled or launched manually.

Inbound enterprise interface builder integrations typically validate, load, and commit data; outbound integrations retrieve data and deliver it to a specified endpoint.

Integration system users are non-worker accounts; they need domain and business process security to run integrations.

Web service operations include Get, Put, Find, Retrieve, and Launch; Get retrieves data and Put creates or updates data.

Cloud Connect is used for predefined integrations with external systems such as banks and benefit providers.

Workday Studio is used for complex orchestrations, custom transformations, and multi-step integrations.

Data loads require correct sequence and reference IDs; load errors are reviewed in the integration event or load results.

Integration events and templates trigger outbound integrations when a business process or data change occurs.

Workday releases twice per year, R1 in March and R2 in September; preview tenants receive the release before production.

Tenant types include Implementation, Sandbox, Preview, and Production; each has different refresh and testing rules.

Edit Tenant Setup tasks configure security, system, company, payroll, and feature activation settings.

Feature activation is often opt-in; release notes and What's New should be reviewed before enabling a feature in production.

Audit reports include Audit Trail for setup and security changes and Data Change Audit for worker data changes.

Sandbox can be refreshed from production; Implementation tenants are used for initial build and testing.

View Audit Trail and View Security for Securable Item support tenant-level change investigation.

Release testing validates business processes, integrations, reports, and security in preview before the production release.