Setup Considerations: Effort Certification

What It Is

U.S. government sponsors require federal grant recipients to certify their efforts for the duration of their grants. It ensures that sponsors only pay for effort related to the grants, and recipients meet their effort commitment for the grants.

Effort certification in Workday enables you to generate and route effort certification reports based on payroll information.

Business Benefits

Effort certification in Workday helps you:

Reduce manual processing by always having up-to-date payroll and supervisory information for a worker and effort period.

Ensure that a worker's payroll costing allocation reflects the actual time spent on a project.

Bill your sponsors the correct worker compensation amount for the work done.

Maintain an audit trail of review and approval comments, survey answers on effort changes, and attestation statements for each effort.

Use Cases

Enable investigators to certify their own efforts and the efforts of their research assistants.

Enable grant administrators to review and approve hundreds of effort certifications twice a year.

Enable payroll administrators to make payroll accounting adjustments when a worker's effort changes from the original allocation.

Enable effort certification managers to recertify an effort because the worker's payroll changed after they last certified the effort.

Enable department administrators to provide support for workers in their department who need to review and certify efforts.

Questions to Consider

Question	Considerations
When do you need to certify your workers' efforts?	Workday enables you to specify a date range for your effort certification based on your award or sponsor requirements. You can create an effort certification report as soon as you've completed the worker's payroll for the date range.
Which worker efforts do you need to certify?	You can run effort certification for either a single worker by name, or a group of workers based on: Worktags on the payroll for the effort period. The pay component group of workers' payrolls. Job profile or other condition rules.
Who do you want to review the effort certification report?	When you configure the Workday Effort Certification business process, you can assign the review, certify, and approval steps to specific security groups in an organization. You can further configure the effort certification type to route the review and approval steps to specific organizations, such as: The organization assignments or home departments of the workers' primary positions. The cost centers on the effort lines that you charge the efforts to. The cost centers on the effort lines that contain grant worktags. For terminated workers, you can configure the business process to route the review and approval steps to roles in the workers' last supervisory organizations or cost centers.
Would you like to preview your effort certification results before initiating the effort certification?	The pro forma effort certification report enables you to prevalidate your effort certification results and prepare for any payroll costing changes before you run the effort certification. You can use it to eliminate surprises and help you budget for payroll expenditures before initiating the effort certification. You can run the pro forma effort certification report against payroll actuals or obligations.
Do you need to make payroll accounting adjustments when there's a change in effort certification?	You can configure the Workday Effort Certification business process to initiate a payroll accounting adjustment after a reviewer or certifier changes an effort allocation.
How do you want to handle effort certifications that have become obsolete?	If a change occurs in payroll after you certify a worker's effort for the same pay period, your effort certification might be obsolete. Workday enables you to detect obsolete effort certifications and recertify them. When you recertify an effort certification, Workday: Cancels the original effort certification. Creates a new effort certification in its place. Links the original and new effort certifications.
Do you need to review multiple effort certifications or certify on behalf of others?	Workday provides security domains for users to perform different tasks on effort certifications. You can grant security group access to these domains based on whether a user needs: View-only access to effort certifications. To review, certify, or approve individual effort certifications. To review, certify, or approve multiple effort certifications simultaneously, through mass submit.
Do you want to customize the effort certification text?	You can customize the attestation statement that your workers agree to when they certify their efforts. You can also create the survey questions that reviewers answer when they make a change to an effort certification. Workday keeps attestation statements and answers to survey questions in the effort certification report for auditing purposes.
How would you like to manage the effort certifications assigned to you?	Workday provides a work area where you can manage effort certifications outside My Tasks. You can: View all the effort certifications that you have access to. Take actions on effort certifications that are awaiting your actions in the work queue. Certify effort certifications on behalf of others. Sort, filter, and search for effort certifications.
How do you want to display the effort certification?	Workday displays effort certification in a composite view that you can configure to: Embed a custom report within an aggregate tab. Hide, display, or rearrange tabs. Group or subtotal by specific business objects. Display worktags associated with an effort. Display compensation amounts in addition to percentages.
Do you want to add attachments to your effort certification report?	You can add attachments to an effort certification report when you: Make a change to the effort certification during the review or certify step in the business process. Append to the effort certification after you've certified and approved the effort certification report.
How do you deliver effort certification reports to your sponsors?	When you need to deliver effort certification reports to your sponsor, Workday enables you to print the reports or export them to Excel spreadsheets.

Recommendations

Workday recommends that you:

Configure the worktag usage for Effort Certification Dimension
to include all the worktag types used in Payroll Costing Allocation
.

Use full worktags in the effort certification type to persist payroll worktags in the effort certification lines.

When you run effort certification, select the company structure used in payroll accounting so that Workday can associate the effort certification with the correct company in payroll.

Recertify effort certifications with the same security access as the user who initiated the original effort certifications, to ensure that Workday detects only the valid changes in payroll.

Requirements

To run effort certification, you must:

Have completed the worker's payroll for the effort period.

Not have run effort certification for the same effort certification type, worker, and date range.

Not be concurrently running another effort certification with the same effort certification type, worker, and overlapping date range.

Limitations

You can't initiate the effort certification process or recertify an effort while payroll accounting for the effort period is in progress. Wait until you've completed payroll before initiating or recertifying your effort certifications.

Changing some settings in the effort certification type requires you to first cancel all non-canceled effort certifications of that type.

You can't set the criteria that Workday uses in recertify to mark an effort certification as possibly obsolete.

Due to a current Workday limitation, step validation conditions won't display on the Effort Certification
business process.

Tenant Setup

Based on your payroll accounting setup, access the

Maintain Payroll Accounting Options

task to select these options:

Salary Over the Cap - Enable

on the Grants/Awards
tab.

Grants - Enable Alternate Costing for Begin / End Dates

on the Grants/Awards
tab.

Intercompany Accounting - Enable

on the General
tab.

To group effort certification lines by grant and program, you need to be able to tag your payroll costing allocations with grant and program worktags. Access the

Maintain Worktag Usage

task, and add the Grant
and Program
workag types to the

Payroll Costing Allocation

taggable.

Security

Configure these domains in the Core Payroll functional area:

Domain	Considerations
Set Up: Effort Certification	Provides access to tasks, reports, and data related to the configuration of effort certification. Enables you to cancel existing effort certification for a company and effort certification type.
Process: Effort Certification	Provides access to effort certification tasks and reports. It's restricted to user-based groups and company or company hierarchy role-based groups.
Reports: Effort Certification	Provides access to effort certification-related reporting. It's restricted to user-based groups and company or company hierarchy role-based groups.
Reports: Manager (Effort Certification)	Provides access to effort certification by organization, primarily for organization managers.
View: Effort Certification	Provides access to users to view the effort certifications in which they have a role.
Worker Data: Effort Certification	Provides access to effort certification reports based on worker organization assignments associated with the primary position. Workday delivers this domain in Suspended mode. Enable and activate the domain security policy before you use it.
Manage: Effort Certification Work Area	Provides view-only access to effort certifications in the work area overview. Workday delivers this domain in Suspended mode. Enable and activate the domain security policy before you use it.
Process: Effort Certification Work Queue	Provides access to the Effort Certification business process from the work area queue. Workday delivers this domain in Suspended mode. Enable and activate the domain security policy before you use it.
Process: Mass Submit Effort Certification	Provides access to the mass submit actions in the work area queue. Workday delivers this domain in Suspended mode. Enable and activate the domain security policy before you use it.
Process: Pro Forma Effort Certification	Provides access to tasks, reports, and data related to: Pro forma effort certification. Pro forma effort certification during recertify.
Worker Data: Position and Employee Worktag	To persist the employee name and position worktags from payroll to effort certification lines. Security to this domain is necessary to: Ensure that when you recertify an effort, Workday doesn't pick up any false differences due to missing worktags. When you make a change to an effort, Workday initiates payroll accounting adjustments with the correct proposed amount.

Business Processes

Business Process	Considerations
Effort Certification	Configure this business process to assign the review, certification, and approval steps to the appropriate security groups in your organization. You can further determine which of these organizations the review and approval steps route to by configuring the effort certification type: Organization assignments of the worker's primary position. Organizations that you charge the effort to.
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments for Effort Certification	To initiate payroll accounting adjustments following an effort change, add this subprocess to the Effort Certification business process after the Completion step.

Reporting

To view the available reports for Workday Effort Certification, access the Workday Standard Reports
report, and select the Effort Certification
report category.

Workday displays the effort certification and pro forma reports in composite views. You can configure the composite views to embed a custom report, display or hide select tabs, and order the tabs according to your preference.

Integrations

Web Service	Considerations
Effort Certification Change Reason Codes	Use to create, update, or retrieve reason codes that describe the changes reviewers make to effort certifications.
Effort Certification Types	Use to create, update, or retrieve effort certification types.
Effort Certifying Texts	Use to create, update, or retrieve the attestation statements that workers use to certify their efforts.

Connections and Touchpoints

Touchpoint	Considerations
Financial Accounting	Effort certification uses financial accounting worktags in the effort lines. Financial accounting also provides the grant worktag in the payroll costing allocation and the timesheet that Workday uses to allocate the effort.
HCM	Provides employee and job-related data for effort certification, such as: Employee name, status, and job profile. The organization assignments of employee's primary job position.
Payroll	When an effort certification reviewer makes a change that affects payroll, you must make accounting adjustments in payroll to reflect the change. Payroll also provides the: Payroll actuals and obligations for effort certification and pro forma effort certification reports. Pay component group that determines the worker population in an effort certification type.
Time Tracking	Effort certification gets the hourly certification from Time Tracking.

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.