Glossary

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Workday Finance

Browse the glossary below to become familiar with Workday Finance terminology:

Quick Links: Financial Accounting - Financial Reporting - General - Internal Service Providers (ISP) - Procurement & Expenses

Last Updated: 8/9/2017

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Workday HR

Browse the glossary below to become familiar with Workday HR terminology:

A

Additional Job: Represents work performed outside of the primary job profile. Additional jobs are considered "non-primary" jobs.

App: Formerly worklet, is a compact report view displayed as an icon on a landing page to provide quick access to tasks and information used regularly. Examples of apps include Benefits and Pay.

B

Business Process: A sequence of one or more configurable steps/tasks that guides the user through the system to accomplish a desired business objective. Examples of business processes are hiring an employee, changing an employee's compensation and updating personal information. The ability to perform actions within a business process is determined by the security role(s) granted to specific user(s).

Business Title: A business title is a descriptive title that provides greater understanding of the employee's responsibilities and scope within the Job Profile. This is also known as the long title. A faculty member's job profile may be Professor; their business title may be Professor of Gastroenterology.

C

Compensation: The combination of elements capturing the total amount of pay provided to an individual as designed and assigned through Workday.

D

Data Management: Processes related to inputting, managing and maintaining employee data.

Delegation: Allows an approver of a business process the ability to permit another user to review and approve processes on his or her behalf. This can be assigned for particular business processes identified by the approver. Also allows a user to delegate the initiation of selected business processes to another user. An entire My Tasks inbox can be delegated to another individual during a leave or vacation.

E

Eligibility Rule: Used to specify one or more criteria that categorize workers into a group that is used to qualify them for participation in an HR-related task such as benefit plans and compensation plans.

Employee Self Service (ESS): Employee access and, in some cases, ability to update or view their personal HR, Benefits, and Payroll data. An example of Employee Self Service is access to change preferred contact information.

Employee Type: Employee type is a categorization that is assigned to each employee at time of hire. For the most part, this designation is informational only. Employees can be searched or filtered by their employee type.

H

Hire Date: Reflects starting date of first-time or rehired employment in a ‘regular’ position; i.e. vacation/sick time benefit eligible position. UM term: Regular Hire Date.

Hyperlinks: Blue underlined text indicating the user can click to open a new page specific to that item.

I

Integration: A boundary across which two independent systems meet and act on or communicate with each other.

J

Job Family Group: The broadest category of classification. Examples of Job Family Groups include Administrative Support/Clerical, Clinical and Allied Services, Information Technology and Students. UM term: Job Family.

Job Family: Broad groupings of jobs that perform similar functions. Examples of job families include Administrative Support, Ophthalmic Services, and Talent Acquisition. UM term: Job Function.

Job Profile: Defines the work performed in exempt and non-exempt positions. It also defines generic features and characteristics of a job and of a position that uses that profile. The more specifically defined a job profile is, the more specifically defined those jobs and positions will be, by default. Job profiles are the most specific element in the job catalog/architecture: job profiles make up job families, which make up job family groups. UM term: Job Title/Job Description.

L

Landing Pages: A page with multiple configured worklets to meet the needs of a certain user of group of users. These worklets enable you to quickly view data and perform tasks. Landing pages can be configured by the individual users.

Leave of Absence: An approved period of time during which an employee may be absent from work, for reasons other than vacation, in respect to policies and procedures.

Leave Type: Defines rules that apply to specific Leaves of Absences such as eligibility and entitlement maximums.

P

Personal Information: Information related to an individual for human resources, benefits and payroll. Some examples of personal information include federal tax information, direct deposit information, benefit choices, retirement elections, dependent and beneficiary information, birthdate, ID information, and emergency contacts.

Pay Group (Payroll related): A group of workers sharing the same job classification, or other uniqe characteristics. The pay group must also share the same work period, accrual schedule and pay date. Pay groups facilitate the calculation of payroll. Workers in a pay group must share the same period schedule.

Payment Election: An employee's choice of bank accounts for receiving their net pay via direct deposit. For each account provided, the employee must designate amounts and/or percentages to be deposited and must also include a 'balance' account for any remaining monies.

Payroll: The process by which employees net pay is derived. The process combines compensation, benefits, statutory, voluntary and involuntary deductions resulting in the net amount payable to the employee. Amounts are displayed on employees’ payslips.

Position: An opening that is created in Workday in order to move or hire a worker into a supervisory organization; allows users to enter hiring restrictions/attributes for a specific position.

Pre-Hire: A status initially assigned upon the offer of employment. All employees have a corresponding pre-hire record in Workday. Note: pre-hire records are established for all students eligible for employment as a 'Student.' Pre-hire is also an employee status representing the period between the date of a University job offer through to the first day of employment. A pre-hire is provided limited access to employee self-service features in Workday to facilitate Onboarding activities.

R

Reports – Standard Report: Reports delivered by Workday for all customers. Many reports within Workday can be viewed as results on the screen, based on the criteria entered by the user. Additionally, report results can be filtered on by column and exported to Excel for additional sorting, formatting, etc.

S

Search: Functionality to locate items, returning all matching objects and actions in the system.

Security Roles: Security roles are Workday designations that determine access to the initiation and approval of business processes as well as to data in Workday. Examples of security roles that may be used include Employee As Self, Manager, HR Partner, and Compensation Administrator.

Supervisory Organization: Supervisory organizations make up the organizational chart by grouping employees into a management hierarchy to define "who reports to whom." A supervisory organization can be a business unit, department, group, or project. Jobs, positions, and compensation structures are associated with supervisory organizations, and workers are hired into jobs or positions associated with a supervisory organization. HR business process approvals and checklists are established for the supervisory organization hierarchy, with possible variations for particular organizations within that hierarchy.

W

Worker: A person who is an employee or student hired by the University.

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