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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Locations and Location Hierarchies

Setup Considerations: Locations and Location Hierarchies

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of locations and location hierarchies. It explains:
  • Why to set them up.
  • How they fit 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

Locations and location hierarchies are geographic attributes of Workday objects.

Business Benefits

Locations enable you to define, track, and report on the geographic attributes of Workday objects. Examples:
  • Time zones and locales so that workers automatically inherit those attributes.
  • Addresses and coordinates for workers and business assets.
  • Geographic regions for job postings and interviews.
  • Classroom locations, features, and capacities.
  • Workspaces and building assets.
Locations roll up to location hierarchies, which are organization types. You must set up locations, but setting up location hierarchies is optional.
Locations extend your ability to manage and report on business facilities, equipment, and the workers who use them. You can set up location usages and identify location assets. Examples:
  • Indicate standard work hours for employees.
  • Provide contact and shipping information.
  • Manage the organizations and positions assigned to locations.
  • Track and assign resources and spaces.
Location hierarchies make reporting on locations and the objects assigned to them easier. Examples:
  • Assign security by location.
  • Report on groups of locations by hierarchy instead of manually selecting individual locations.
  • Build condition rules based on location hierarchy to improve efficiency and reduce maintenance.

Use Cases

The use cases for locations vary depending on the products that you configure in your tenant and the features that you use.
Product or Feature
Use Case
Business Processes
You need to provide different onboarding documents for employees in different states. Locations enable you to use a condition rule that ensures you include all required locations in this business process.
You can create a location hierarchy to use in a condition rule for each state to avoid making future updates when you create new locations.
Financial
You can:
  • Define location hierarchies based on regulatory regions.
  • Set up locations for geographical financial reporting if physical locations align with financial reporting requirements.
  • Configure storage locations for shipping goods and services for procurement.
HCM
To set up local HR support for a global company, you can:
  • Define a location for each building where workers work.
  • Define a global location hierarchy to group locations. Example: By city, state, country, and continent.
Payroll
You can restrict schedules and wages based on local regulations.
Recruiting
You can enable:
  • Recruiters to access reports and tasks for candidates and available jobs based on city, region, and country.
  • Job candidates to search for jobs based on locations.
Reporting
To report on all locations in a region, you can configure the region as the location hierarchy instead of selecting individual locations.
Security
You have HR partners assigned by superior organization but there are workers in different countries within the same organization. You can create separate local HR partner roles and assign them to each location hierarchy based on country. Then you can assign security based on the intersection of the groups so that HR partners only see workers that they support.
Student
You can:
  • Track and report on usages and schedules.
  • Enable instructors to select classrooms based on attributes like physical location, capacity, ADA compliance, and equipment.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Do you require security at location level?
Workday recommends setting up location hierarchies. The first level should be a one-to-one mapping to each physical location. The second level can group each location into logical groups that can roll up to the global level.
Do you need to track details about your locations?
Build a hierarchy within the location. Example: Building, floor, space number.
Does your company have compliance audit requirements (Example: EEO)?
If so, you must use establishments along with the locations.
Do you have remote workers, workers who report to multiple locations, or who report to client locations?
When you have workers assigned to remote sites, consider the implications of assigning them to physical locations. Instead you can group them into designated locations by state, province, or other logical designation.
For payroll, consider grouping workers by tax jurisdiction.
How do you plan to name your locations?
Select your naming conventions carefully and consider external audiences.
  • Location names should make sense to internal and external end users.
  • For large organizations or many locations, consider sort order for drop-down lists.
  • Create location names that are easy to understand because external users use them for purchase orders, job requisitions, and deliveries.
Do you require location hierarchies?
Location hierarchies are optional. You can include a location in more than 1 hierarchy as long as the locations don't roll up to the same parent.

Recommendations

  • Consider your location usage and its relationship to physical addresses when defining locations.
  • Base your location hierarchies on geographic location, not sales territory or region of responsibility.
  • Workday recommends that you configure the
    Location: View
     domain to inherit parent permissions.

Requirements

Enable the organizations and roles functional area. You must configure locations because they control other functions throughout Workday.

Limitations

You can't:
  • Assign roles to locations. Instead, assign roles to location hierarchies.
  • Define organization assignments on locations. Instead define organization assignments on location hierarchies.
  • Use business processes to create locations.

Tenant Setup

Organization subtypes are tenant-wide and determine which subtypes you can use for location hierarchies.

Security

These domains in the Organizations and Roles functional area:
Domain
Considerations
Location: View
Grants access to view a subset of location details.
Workday recommends that you configure this domain to inherit parent permissions. Organization subtypes are tenant-wide and determine which subtypes you can use for location hierarchies.
Manage: Location
  • You must have modify access to create or maintain locations. Example: Organization administrators and implementers security groups.
  • Grant view access to any security groups that need to see details about locations. Example: Contingent workers, all employees, and auditor security groups.
Manage: Location Hierarchy
  • You must have modify access to create or maintain location hierarchies. Example: Organization administrators and implementers security groups.
  • Grant view access to auditor security groups.
Set Up: Organization
Enables you to maintain the list of organization types and subtypes.

Business Processes

You can't create locations or location hierarchies using business processes. However, location hierarchies are an organization type, so you can use reorganization business process types for these location-related tasks:
  • Divide Organization
  • Create Subordinate
  • Change Visibility
  • Assign Superior
Locations and location hierarchies are cross functional and used throughout Workday in different ways.

Reporting

When you set up locations and location hierarchies, consider how they’ll be used in reports. Locations and location hierarchies are displayed in several Workday-delivered reports. Examples:
  • Find Jobs for External Career Sites
  • Find Jobs for Internal Career Sites
  • Audit: Worksite Discrepancies for Company
  • Multiple Worksite Report by Company

Integrations

If you have inbound integrations that create or update locations, make sure that the integration uses the same naming conventions and that it inserts new locations into the appropriate location hierarchy.

Connections and Touchpoints

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.
Locations control many other functions throughout Workday. Examples:
  • Standard work hours for employees.
  • Contact and shipping information.
  • Tax jurisdictions for payroll.