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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-19
Setup Considerations: Compensation Reviews

Setup Considerations: Compensation Reviews

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of compensation reviews. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Compensation reviews enable you to plan for and grant periodic:
  • Merit increases to base pay, including promotions, allowances, and lump sum awards.
  • Bonuses, including cash and deferred bonus in the form of stock.
  • Stock grants as shares, options, or cash.
As part of your planning process, you can decide on compensation review milestones and set up grid configurations and named sets of initiation options.

Business Benefits

The compensation review process enables you to:
  • Schedule important compensation milestones.
  • Configure the organization type and roles with authority to create, edit, or review awards.
  • Process staffing changes while compensation reviews are in progress.
  • Manage budgets.
  • Include merit, bonus, or stock plans.
  • Select the organizations to include.
  • Select the eligibility rules for target employee populations.
  • Identify those responsible for planning, approving, and reviewing awards.
You can create a custom set of fields, or grid configurations, to guide managers during compensation reviews. You can set the fields to read-only, editable, or advanced (drill-down). You can reuse or update grid configurations in subsequent review cycles.

Use Cases

You can plan and schedule regular compensation reviews, including:
  • Annual reviews that include merit, bonus, and stock awards.
  • Semiannual or quarterly reviews that include bonus awards.
  • Periodic reviews that include only stock awards and align with your fiscal cycle.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Do you have employees in multiple countries or managers with direct reports in other countries?
As a best practice, consider selecting the
Calculate Inverse Rate
on the
Maintain Currency Conversion Rates
task for the selected rate type and affected currencies.
If selected, Workday automatically calculates the inverse currency exchange rate between the source and target currencies.
You can also select your own currency exchange rate.
Which goals factor into bonus awards?
To calculate bonuses, you can create compensation scorecards to capture company, division, or department goals and their attainment.
Do you offer stock to your employees?
You can configure stock plans based on amount, percent, or units. You can also grant cash in the same manner as stock.
You can use a third-party stock administration application to enable employees to manage their stock awards.
Do you move employees between organizations or create new organizations during compensation reviews?
You can use the
Maintain Compensation Review Process Employee Participation
report to add or remove employees to or from in-progress compensation review processes. You can also use the
Compensation Review Maintain Employee Participation
operation type on the
Mass Operation Management
task to remove or add back previously removed employees.
The
Compensation Review Update New Organization Data
task runs automatically on a regular schedule to detect organizations that aren't currently in a compensation review process but have eligible employees resulting from:
  • The
    Maintain Compensation Review Process Employee Participation
    report.
  • The
    Change Job
    process.
  • The
    Request Compensation Change
    process.
  • The
    Move Workers
    process.
  • The
    Change Organization Assignment
    process.
This task automatically adds new organizations provided they're both subordinate to the top level organization and existed before you initiated the process. Optionally, you can use this task to manually add newly detected organizations more quickly than the automatic process.
As a best practice, Workday recommends that you create new organizations that you intend to add to a compensation review process before you initiate the process.
How do you manage staffing and compensation changes that occur while the compensation reviews are in-progress?
You can configure participation rule sets to manage individual compensation, grade, or job changes while the compensation review is in-progress.
You can also:
  • Access the
    Create Compensation Review Options
    task.
  • Allow specific business processes to proceed with options for date ranges or eligibility rules.
If you don't configure participation rule sets, Workday blocks job or compensation changes for eligible employees.
  • After process initiation.
  • Before the latest effective date of any award in the compensation review event.
Do you need to allow some staffing or compensation changes while compensation reviews are in progress?
You can configure compensation review options that allow
Change Job
or
Request Compensation Change
events to proceed.
You can:
  • Allow all events for the process to proceed for 1 or more date ranges.
  • Allow only events for the process to proceed for 1 or more eligibility rules and for 1 or more date ranges.
What fields do you want managers to view during compensation reviews?
You can configure compensation review grid configuration fields as read-only, editable, and advanced (drill-down) fields.
Is 1 compensation review grid adequate, or do you require more than 1, each targeted for a specific population?
You can set up grid configuration profiles, each targeted at users based on locale, organization, assigned roles, and other attributes. You can also set up a default grid configuration.
Do you use eligibility waiting periods?
You can configure eligibility waiting periods to determine whether employees are eligible for merit raises or bonuses.
Do you prorate merit or bonus target amounts?
You can base proration rules on base pay changes, time since hire, leaves of absence, and other criteria.
What period do you consider when prorating awards?
Workday uses the process period end date to determine:
  • Eligible employees based on their plan assignments.
  • The proration calculations and performance ratings used.
When do you want employees to find out their awards?
You can set an employee visibility date to hide awards until management communicates with employees outside of Workday.

Recommendations

Workday recommends that you create or retire organizations either before initiating a compensation review process or after the process completes.
If you use compensation matrices and include performance ratings, Workday recommends that you complete performance ratings before the process period end date of the compensation review.
Determine whether your event is large enough that you need to work with the Workday Production Readiness team.
See Workday Community: Production Readiness: Large Volume Events Best Practices. for guidelines about opening a Production Readiness case.

Requirements

No impacts.

Limitations

Workday doesn't support intersection security groups with exclusion criteria for compensation reviews.

Tenant Setup

You can configure these compensation review options on the
Edit Tenant Setup - HCM
task:
Option
Description
Disable Create New Compensation Review Statement functionality for Employee on View Compensation Review Statements
Prevents employees from creating their own compensation review statement.
Preferred Compensation Review Employee Awards Grid Limit
Workday limits to 500 the number of employees in the same organization hierarchy that a planner can view.

Security

These security domains in the Advanced Compensation functional area.
Domains
Considerations
Worker Data: Stock Grants
Required to configure stock pools or issue stock grants.
Worker Data: Propose Stock Award as Part of Compensation Review
Required to issue stock awards during compensation reviews.
You can only configure roles on the same organization type as used in the
Complete Employee Awards
step.
Worker Data: Compensation Review Statements
Enables managers to print statements for their direct reports.
Self-Service: Compensation Review Statement
Enables employees to print their own statements.
Process: Compensation Management Events
Enables compensation administrators to initiate and finalize the process.
Process: Compensation Review Process Controls
Enables the Manager role to access and complete tasks.
Process: Compensation Review Process Participant
Enables support roles such as HR Partner and Compensation Partner to view and edit employee awards.
Process: Compensation Review Process Reviewer
Enables Reviewers (HR Partners and location or regional managers) to view or edit awards.
Process: Compensation Review Rule Based Access
Enables you to configure rule-based security for compensation administrators and others with heightened security to control employee-as-self access.
View Compensation Review Pool Data
Enables you to hide compensation review pool and budget wheel graphics from target populations of compensation review users.

Business Processes

Before configuring the
Initiate Compensation Review Process
business process for all compensation reviews, consider which roles:
  • Should have control over submitting employee awards. Examples: Merit Planner or Manager.
  • To add to the
    Complete Employee Awards
    subprocess: Example: Compensation Administrator.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
Compensation Review Process Search Employees (Default)
You can use this report to give participants access to the grid configuration within the Organization Summary.
Compensation Review Organization Search Report (Default)
You can use this report to give reviewers access to the grid configuration within the Organization Summary.
Compensation Review Process Status Report By Hierarchy
Administrators can use this report to access organizations in the process and review budgets, spend, and status.
Maintain Bonus Accrual Estimates
You can use this report to estimate bonus costs using the same initiation parameters as a periodic compensation review.

Integrations

Workday provides these public web services to support compensation reviews:
Web Service
Description
Get Compensation Matrices
Retrieves compensation review matrices. You can also use the
Put Compensation Matrices
web service.
Get Compensation Review Participation Rule Sets
Retrieves compensation review participation rule sets created on the
Maintain Compensation Review Participation Rule Sets
task.
You can also use the
Put Compensation Review Participation Rule Sets
Get Compensation Review Validation Rules
Provides validation rules created in Workday for compensation review processes.
Get Deferred Bonus Calculation
Displays deferred bonus calculations that you created on the
Create Deferred Bonus Calculation
task.
Get Eligibility Waiting Period
Provides eligibility waiting periods created on the
Create Compensation Eligibility Rule
task or the
Put Eligibility Waiting Period
web service.
Get Employee Awards
Provides employee awards for a specific employee by position or all employees in a supervisory organization.
Get Import Compensation Review Budget Pools
Imports into the compensation review budget pools for single or multiple organizations, by compensation review event and organization. You can include subordinate organizations by compensation plan type.
Import Compensation Review Budget Pools
Updates the budget pool, holdback, and reserve information for all supervisory organizations for a specified compensation review.
Import Eligible Earnings Override
Adds or updates eligible earnings override information for a given employee.
Workday updates in-progress compensation reviews that:
  • Have participation rule sets.
  • Include bonus awards.
Import Employee Awards
Updates employee awards for specified employees, organization, and compensation review.
Put Compensation Matrices
Uploads compensation review matrices. You can also use the
Get Compensation Matrices
web service.
Put Compensation Review Participation Rule Sets
Uploads compensation review participation rule sets.
You can also use the
Get Compensation Review Participation Rule Sets
web service.
Put Compensation Review Validation Rules
You can upload new or modified validation rules for compensation review processes into Workday.
Put Deferred Bonus Calculation
Add or change a deferred bonus calculation.
Put Eligibility Waiting Period
You can upload new or modified eligibility waiting periods.

Touchpoints and Connections

Compensation review events can touch many other areas in Workday, including the
Hire
and
Change Job
business processes, Workday Payroll, Workday Expenses, and Workday Talent.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships across your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.