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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2024-03-08
Concept: Guidelines for Storing Time Off Balances

Concept: Guidelines for Storing Time Off Balances

Workday calculates time off plan balances and accrual amounts dynamically based on time off plan rules when workers access time off tasks and reports in your tenant. Workday accesses reports in the background that run calculations from a specific point in time to access the balance values.
All workers have time off history. Workday pulls many events into their worker profile, including time off events, accruals that accumulate, and carryover from balance period to balance period. Workday accesses the same information at different speeds, depending on whether you configure Workday to store balances:
  • If you don't configure the tenant to store balances, processing takes much longer. If there isn't a specific point in time to reference, Workday runs calculations starting from when balances were first entered in Workday. Workday has to go back to the workers' initial history to calculate all of the absence components and output their absence balance results.
  • In contrast, if you store balances at intervals, when workers access their time off plan balances, Workday displays calculated results from the most recent stored balances. Because Workday is using a more recent date, the processing time is much faster, providing a better, more efficient user experience.
To optimize performance, you can schedule processes to store balances on a regular basis for all time off plans that track balances. When you use the
Schedule Time Off Calculated Balance Process
 task to store balances as of 91 days or more and accruals, Workday uses the stored balances and accrual amounts as the starting point for subsequent dynamic calculations.
You can store balances as of the start date of any period within the time off plan's period schedule. You can't store balances for a future date.
If you experience performance issues related to absence, use the
View Schedules for Time Off Calculated Balance Process
 report to check whether you have schedules for storing time off balances. If not, create them.

Best Practices for Performance

To maintain a minimum level of performance, Workday checks every month whether a time off plan has stored balances as of a date within the past 13 months. If not, Workday automatically stores balances as of 13 months before the third Sunday of that month. However, Workday recommends that you manually schedule processes customized for your time off plans and business requirements.
We recommend that you:
  • Don't store balances as of today's date.
  • Run the
    Schedule Time Off Calculated Balance Process
     as of 91 days or more. When storing balances, Workday uses the period start date, derived from the plan's period schedule.
  • Don't run the
    Schedule Time Off Calculated Balance Process
     more often than the frequency of your period schedule. Examples: If the period schedule for the time off plan is:
    • Biweekly. You can run the process biweekly. Don't run the process weekly.
    • Monthly. You can run the process monthly or less often than monthly. Don't run the process weekly or biweekly.
    • Quarterly. Run the process every 3 months. Don't run the process weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
    Don't run the process for the current period. Set the value of
    Days Before Run Date
     to greater than zero. As a best practice, set to 91 days or more. The main benefit of setting the value to 91 days or more is to ensure that Workday stores the accrual, which further improves performance.
  • Edit the schedule of the job to process fewer plans at the same time or increase the recurrence frequency.
  • Schedule the process to run at night.
    For initial Workday deployment projects or for Mergers and Acquisitions, consider the order of operations as this can impact processing times for calculations. For optimal performance, when loading balances for terminated workers to your Workday tenants, Workday recommends performing these steps in this order:
    1. Load time off
    2. Store balances.
    3. Terminate worker.
  • Use Import web services for time off and absence for high-volume record transactions of more than 2000 rows per load.
  • Be mindful of reporting schedules and synching them up. Ensure that you run reports before running scheduled time off calculated balances. Run your reports quarterly and calculate stored balances at least quarterly. Providing a starting point to calculate balances helps the reporting framework recall the information. If you're running quarterly company-wide Absence accrual reports, it's better to run the reports close to the time after your recent scheduled stored balance run. Custom reports and indexed data sources, such as Workers for HCM Reporting, are key considerations for efficient performance, helping to recall absence balances stored in a more performant way.
  • If your organization has more than 100,000 active HCM workers, you should review your tenant performance because of the volume of transactions that you're likely to have. Supporting this number of workers can require additional attention to assess tenant run time and end-user experiences.
  • Run the
    Schedule Time Off Calculated Balance Process
     process after employees have finished entering time off for the period.
    Example: Wait until employees enter their time off at the end of the year before running the process for December. This method reduces the number of times Workday must recalculate and store balances in response to retroactive entries.

Tenant Setup

Review how the Absence worklet displays balances. If you notice that they're taking a long time to load, or the worklet is taking a long time to populate, consider accessing the
Edit Tenant Setup - HCM
 task and navigate to the
Time Off
 section. Select the
Disable Absence Worklet Balances
 option. Workers can continue to view their balances on the calendar when they view their absences or request absence.
Review your tenant settings for Payroll. Access the
Edit Tenant Setup - Payroll
 task, navigate to the
Payslips
 section, and enable the
Persist Absence Data for Payslips
 options to improve performance for payslips and the web service for
Get Payroll Payslips
. The persistence occurs between pay calculation and pay completion. Workday looks at the persisted absence data from the pay result, except when the payroll was completed before you enabled the option.

Performance Impacts

These factors add to the complexity of time off balance calculations. Consider whether you must run the process more often for some or all plans:
  • Period schedule frequency. Example: Weekly or monthly. Don't use daily period schedules in time off plans. Workday recommends that you select a weekly schedule at a minimum.
  • Limits: upper, lower, and carryover.
  • Multiple accruals associated with the balance.
  • Multiple time offs associated with the plan.
  • Plan balance that is dependent on another plan balance.
  • Number of periods processed in the period schedule.
  • Number of employees eligible for the plan. Configure country eligibility on time off plans or holiday calendars.
  • Volume of overrides and adjustments.
  • Volume of time off requests with time calculations entered through Workday Time Tracking.
  • Volume of time off and corrections loaded through web services.
Some general recommendations:
  • Include each plan in 1 schedule only.
  • Consider storing balances for complex accruals, and for those that use rolling accruals. Not doing so can adversely impact tenant results and run times.
  • Ensure that period schedules are limited to only the length of time needed to load balances for workers. Creating period schedules too far in the past, and not consistently storing those balances, results in Workday taking longer to dynamically calculate balances.
  • Ensure that you're using advanced lookup table calculations.
  • When you use
    Time Off Paid
     Absence Component Related Calculations (ACRCs), these calculations need to evaluate other calculations, such as the lower limit to return a value. Often, it isn't necessary to use this ACRC if the plan is using a lower limit and the
    Maximum Unpaid Time Off Units Allowed
     validation. If possible, use the
    Time Off Total
     ACRC instead, as this doesn't evaluate other calculations.
  • Review your security configurations. Complex configurations on Absence-related domains and business process security policies can impact access to tasks and business processes.

Integrations

Many integrations use the reporting framework to retrieve data for external web services. If balances aren't stored and the web service runs, this can impact run times of scheduled integrations. Consider the performance impact for the tenant pushing or pulling information for inbound and outbound transactions.
For outbound transactions, check whether the integration is accessing balances based on a period of time. The amount of data and timeframe can impact performance. If possible, try to limit those timeframes. If you know that an integration takes a long time to run, consider running the integration at a different time, or whether storing balances can make the integration go faster.