6 Exciting Payroll Enhancements In Workday 33

In the payroll community, we tend to resist change. Once the flow is set and the process is operational, the thought of altering anything can cause palpitations. However, Workday updates are not changes to fear! They bring important enhancements that are designed to ensure that your tenant is processing at top performance and to keep your processes accurate and operational. So here's a summary of beneficial new Workday Payroll features I encourage you to explore and make use of. Safe Harbour applies.

Run Pay Calculation by Subset of Workers

In payroll, the need to run pay calcs for a single worker arises frequently—for example when paying a terminated employee after payroll has been processed or when you need to calculate upcoming payroll for a group of workers for bonuses. But prior to Workday 33, you had to run the entire calculation in order to target a single employee within a pay group. With this enhancement, you can now calculate just that one worker, or a subset of workers, in a period or pay group—a fantastic time saver and extremely helpful for testing.

How to enable it

This feature is automatically available. While the prompt will exist, you're not required to use it.

Improving Gross-Ups

In Workday 27, Workday provided us the ability to combine a single gross-up payment on a single check, which helpfully eliminated the need to create separate checks for gross-ups. In this release, Workday has expanded that functionality to allow you to split gross ups for ongoing work jurisdictions and manage FLSA allocations.

How to enable it

This update is automatically available. If you do nothing, you'll still be able to process multiple (up to 4) gross-up payments for a single worker at once. The default tolerance will be set to .01, and the order in which they'll be processed will be based on the order in which they were created in your tenant. To access the task and prioritise the the order you need the gross-ups processed, search for the Maintain Gross-Up Configurations task. You can find out more about the gross-ups features here on Workday Community.

Better User Experience for Voluntary Deductions

Workday 32 allowed for voluntary deductions that had fallen out of the scope of benefits—such as pet insurance or United Way—to be selected as elections within Employee Self-Service. With Workday 33, those can now be elected and maintained by employees themselves. Workday has also simplified the configuration process for this task, provided help text to guide them through this process, and has enabled it on Mobile for Employees.

How to enable it

Setup is required to enable this feature. Also note that to allow employees to maintain their voluntary deductions, you must add the Voluntary Deductions report to the Worker Profile using the Configure Profile Group task.

More Flexible Payroll Audits

Been wishing you could get more granular during payroll audits and target specific subsets of workers—for example specifically audit:

• any overtime hours
• for non-exempt employees
• who work in California.

Rejoice! Workday 33 now gives you the ability to create audit rules based on Worker Eligibility and provides you with multiple ways to view the report data.

How to enable it

While this feature is automatically available, you will need to create audit rules via the Maintain Payroll Audit Configurations task. If you choose not to create additional rules for your audits, be aware that that after the Workday 33 release, any flags (red or yellow) that are currently set up in your existing audit configurations will be displayed as severity levels on the following reports: Payroll Audit Exception Summary and Payroll Audit Exceptions.

Daily Hours for Payroll Input

If you're using a third-party time tracking system that's integrated with Workday, this feature should be of interest to you. Until now, time that was brought in via integrations was brought in as multiple line results. This update allows the time to be brought in as time blocks, like daily hours—increasing both visibility in reporting and overall payroll performance.

How to enable it

This feature is automatically available, but some setup effort is required.

Worksheets for 3rd-Party Payroll Input

In addition to these newcomers, here's a late (and valuable) Workday 32 release that you might have missed during the previous update. This is an awesome feature that allows the maintenance of Payroll Input via a spreadsheet. Any updates made to the spreadsheet are applied to Workday in real time. Think Excel online! Also, don 't forget to spend some time in the Workday 33 Preparation Center. You 'll find everything you need there to stay on top of the game!