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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-03-14
Setup Considerations: Organizations

Setup Considerations: Organizations

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of organizations. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How this feature 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

Organizations are groups of resources, workers, costs, and other organizations for business process routing, security, analysis, and reporting. Along with roles and hierarchies, organizations are part of the foundation that provides configurable and contextual security within Workday. The way that you configure your organizations influences everything from your staffing models and role assignments to your physical locations and reporting.
Common organization types include:
  • Company.
  • Cost Centers.
  • Custom Organizations.
  • Location Hierarchies.
  • Matrix.
  • Pay Group.
  • Regions.
  • Supervisory. (Similar to departments in other products.)

Business Benefits

Organizations are a required Workday feature that helps you:
  • Analyze your business needs and structure. Examples:
    • Organize logical worker groupings and business processes that reflect different reporting structures.
    • Set up operations based on business units, regions, and cost centers.
    • Build flexibility into individual organizations so that managers can operate their organizations according to business needs.
    • Set up organization charts to reflect divisions of work and management structure.
    • Assign staffing models to establish how you define and fill jobs and positions.
  • Report on and track progress. Examples:
    • Organization history for accreditation, compliance, and regulatory purposes.
    • Identify eligibility for pay, benefits, compensation, and time off.
    • Configure organization charts to include metrics so that you can monitor business performance.
    • Make decisions about division of work based on organizational reporting that tracks data such as staffing, compliance, and accreditation.
  • Set up automated processes. Examples:
    • Configure separate business processes for individual organizations and organization types.
    • Set up automated processes to assign workers to their management and support teams.
    • Aggregate data for reports.

Use Cases

Product
Example Use Case
Business Processes
Managers can customize business processes according to organization and organization types. Examples: By superior organization, company, recruiting, or pay group.
HCM
HR administrators can assign other human resources administrators to support groups of workers according to different organization types. Examples: Location hierarchy, supervisory organization, or department.
Organizations
Managers can:
  • Use reorganizations to change their organization structure over time. Examples: Create subordinate, assign superior, inactivate organization, divide organization, and move workers.
  • Configure custom organizations to align with unique practices of your industry or the specific way that you run your business. Examples: Stores and districts.
Reporting
Managers can:
  • Define reporting relationships that represent the structure on an organization chart.
  • Set up matrix organizations that they can use to link workers who work together but belong to different supervisory organizations.
Security
  • Security administrators can provide precise contextual security for role assignees and members.
  • Administrators can create location hierarchies, which enable you to configure security and view reports from an aggregated location perspective.
Student
Administrators can:
  • Create academic units in university settings for academic appointments, academic affiliates, and professorships.
  • Set up grants as a costing organization to manage award activities and report on awards.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
What Workday products or functions are you planning to use?
The structure and purpose of your enterprise determine the organization types that you set up. Decide how granular your organization structure and security will be according to industry, region, and regulatory requirements.
What do you want to report on?
Workday provides reports that enable you to view summary or detailed data about organizations for administrators and end users. They way you structure organizations affects reporting.
Organizations represent dimensions that you can report on and determine the level of detail. Workday organizations are mutually exclusive, which provides built-in flexibility for your organization structure.
How will you assign organizations to workers?
Consult with stakeholders to determine if you'll:
  • Manually assign organizations to each worker.
  • Assign organizations as part of a staffing event process like hiring or job changes.
You can also set up some organization types based on rules. Example: Custom organizations.
What organization security do you require?
Carefully consider the level of granularity for security. If security isn't restrictive enough, too many people can have unintentional access to sensitive data. But if security is too restrictive, it can be difficult to maintain. Determine who can:
  • View organizations and members.
  • Create and modify organizations.
  • Modify organization structures and hierarchies.
Example: Business processes route approvals to specific roles based on organization and where a role fits into an organization hierarchy.
Do your organizations span multiple time zones?
When you set up your tenant, consider who is supporting which groups of workers and the time zones for your organizations. This ensures that effective dates for business processes, role assignments, and pay are processed as expected.
How will you assign roles to each organization?
Consider role-based security and how roles function within organizations. Example: If human resources personnel support workers in a region or location, they should be assigned to a location. But if human resources personnel support a business unit, they should be assigned to supervisory organizations.
How will you use organizations and how will they be structured?
Determine if you’ll require specialized program categories. Examples:
  • Public sector and higher education categories like fund, gift, and grant.
  • Location categories like regions and territories.
  • Business unit categories like product lines and custom categories.
The organization type determines the functionality that is included. These organization type examples include certain features automatically:
  • Company includes bank accounts and fiscal schedules.
  • Location includes addresses and regions.
  • Pay group includes pay schedules and payroll.
When no Workday organization type fits your organization, you can create custom organizations.
What organization structure do you require?
Workday supports many organization structures. Examples:
  • Decentralized
  • Hierarchical
  • Matrix
Do you need custom organizations?
Determine if you need to group workers for an enterprise-specific purpose that isn't served by a Workday-delivered organization type.
Example: Store, which has roles, and store regions, which would also have roles assigned, so you can set up inheritance.
Custom organizations can be rolled up by more than 1 custom organization type that supports hierarchy.
Can you use custom organization as a custom worktag?
Yes. You can use custom organization as a custom worktag in Financial Management and Payroll. There’s no limit to the number of custom organizations that you can create.
However, there's a limit to the number of custom organizations that you can designate as a custom worktag. You can only use 10 custom organizations as custom worktags, and is important when implementing HCM or Payroll without Financial Management that you consider this limit.

Recommendations

  • Design your organizations so that they work with other functional areas like payroll, human resources, and finance.
  • Involve stakeholders from all business entities within your organization.
  • Involve your security, system, and business process administrators to ensure that you meet all requirements related to approvals, business process routing, and data access.
  • Consider the granularity and aggregation of your reporting as you design your organization structure because organizations play an essential role in reporting.
  • Carefully assess organization hierarchies. Creating large number of custom or nested hierarchies or using them in eligibility rules impacts performance.

Requirements

You must:
  • Set up supervisory organizations because all workers must be assigned to a supervisory organization, which are subordinates of their managers' organizations. Managers aren’t members of the supervisory organization that contain their direct reports.
  • Select a staffing model, either position management or job management, for supervisory organizations.

Limitations

A supervisory organization can only have 1 staffing model. Not all supervisory organizations require the same staffing model, but you can only move workers between organizations that use the same staffing models.
You can assign individual workers to several organizations, including several organizations of the same type.

Tenant Setup

Access the
Edit Tenant Setup - System
 task to configure:
  • Default time zone and other time-zone options.
  • Organization hierarchies that the processing user can view.

Security

Some organization types are secured by separate domains for creating, managing, and viewing organization types. You must set up at least one of these domains in the Organizations and Roles functional area:
Domain
Considerations
Create: Supervisory Organization
Enables you to maintain and view:
  • Organization types and subtypes.
  • Business site usages.
  • Time profiles
Provides global access to organizations, enabling you to:
  • Correct organization exceptions.
  • Define membership rules.
  • View organization audits and reports.
Manage: Membership Rule Create
Enables you to create membership rules.
Manage: Membership Rule Edit
Enables you to edit and view membership rules. Enables self-service users to access membership rules that they create.
Set Up: Organization
Enables you to maintain and view:
  • Organization types and subtypes.
  • Business site usages.
  • Time profiles
Provides global access to organizations, enabling you to:
  • Correct organization exceptions.
  • Define membership rules.
  • View organization audits and reports.

Business Processes

Business processes for organizations are divided between these categories:
  • Creating or updating organization status or structure. Examples:
    • Activation
    • Assign Superior
    • Assign Included Organizations
    • Create Subordinate
    • Divide Organization
  • Assigning and removing organizations to positions or workers. Examples:
    • Assign Matrix Organization
    • Assign Multiple Matrix Members
    • Assign Pay Group
    • Change Organization Assignments
    • Create Position
    • Move Workers
    • Remove From Matrix Organization
    • Remove Multiple Matrix Members

Reporting

Organizations have different structures and usages within each Workday product and function. Examples: Human Capital Management, Payroll, Recruiting, and Student have unique reporting options.
You can use these reports to view summary or detailed data about existing organizations:
Report
Description
Organization Summary
Displays a list of all organizations filtered by selected organization types, with summary information.
To display the organization chart for any organization that you have permissions to view, click the related actions menu for that Organization, and then click
Org Chart.
Organizations I Belong To
Displays a list of all organizations that you are a member of.
My Self-Assign Roles
Displays a list of all organizations for which your position is assigned to a role indicated as
Self-Assign
 in
Maintain Assignable Roles
.
My Leadership Roles report or worklet
Displays a list of all organizations for which your position is assigned to a role indicated as
Is Leadership
 in
Maintain Assignable Roles
My Supporting Roles
Displays a list of all organizations for which your position is assigned to a role indicated as
Is Supporting
 in
Maintain Assignable Roles
.
You can use these reports to manage and track organizations:
Report
Description
Maintain Organization Types
Enables you to manage and configure various types of organizations, such as companies, cost centers, regions, and more.
View Members As Of
Displays members of an organization on any given historical or future date, considering the effective dates of workers' assignments.
View Organization As Of
Displays the state of an organization at a specific point in time. This report enables you to understand the structure, staffing, and other key attributes of an organization as they were on a particular date.
View Organization Chart As Of
Displays an organization's structure, including reporting relationships and hierarchy, as of a specific date.
View Organization Members
Displays members of an organization that are assigned by a membership rule to a custom organization. This report uses the All Positions data source.
View Supervisory Organization
Displays the workers, staffing information, organization roles, and security groups. This report enables you to find and access related actions on workers, roles, unfilled positions, and more.
Organization Assignment Exception Audit
Displays a list of invalid organization assignments for a position restriction based on allowed values of its supervisory organization or the location hierarchy (or hierarchies) in which its location is included.
Organization Exception Audit
Displays organizations for which there are errors or warnings. This report displays the business object that has the problem and a description of the problem or solution.
Organization Type Exception Audit
Displays organization types for which there are errors or warnings. This report displays the organization type, such as supervisory organization or company, that has the problem and a description of the problem or solution.
To view a complete list of Workday reports with descriptions, you can run the
All Workday Delivered and Custom Reports
 task.

Integrations

When you want to access organizations with visibility restrictions using an integration, you need to:
  • Provide the integration system user (ISU) account that you're using with Get and Put access to the domains that secure those organizations.
  • Provide the ISSG with Get and Put access to the domains that secure the organization web services the ISU is trying to run.

Connections and Touchpoints

Organizations interact with nearly every Workday feature.
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. The Touchpoints Kit helps you anticipate how any organization type interacts across Workday including HCM, Finance, Payroll, and Student.

Other Impacts

No impact.