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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2024-09-20
Setup Considerations: Pay Balances

Setup Considerations: Pay Balances

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of pay balances. 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 They Are

Pay balances calculate the value of 1 or more pay component results over a period of time. You can set up pay balances to include a combination of:
  • Deductions.
  • Earnings.
  • Pay accumulations.
  • Pay component related calculations (PCRCs).
  • Pay component groups.

Business Benefits

The pay balance feature makes it easy to cover a variety of audits and calculations by providing flexibility on the:
  • Inputs you include in the calculation.
  • Period you use for aggregations.
Pay balances also provide transparent calculations that are easy to troubleshoot. You can view the:
  • Components of each pay balance.
  • Calculations each pay balance impacts.
Workday automatically recalculates pay balances every time you view a report or page, ensuring that you have accurate, up-to-date information.

Use Cases

  • Calculate payroll inputs, such as average weekly hours paid.
  • Compare individual payroll results to month-to-date or year-to-date totals in your auditing process.
  • Track open-ended loan repayments.
  • Validate year-to-date pay.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
What balances do you want to display on your workers' payroll results?
When creating a pay balance, you can decide whether or not to display the aggregated results or other balances on worker payroll results. Example: You can display year-to-date tax contributions on worker results to help with payroll verifications.
Over what time period do you want to aggregate results?
When configuring a pay balance, the balance period determines when to aggregate results. Examples: Month-to-date, year-to-date. You can also exclude values from the current gross-to-net calculation.
To create an ongoing aggregation of values, you can use a balance period with an end date set to the current period start, end, or payment date.
If you only need to return aggregated values for a single pay period, consider creating a pay accumulation or a pay component group instead of a pay balance.
Pay balances that you create during or after the specified balance period sum the entire period.
Do you want to display aggregated results on a worker's payslip?
To display aggregated results on a worker's payslip, you can either:
  • Use the balance-period mapping feature to display payslip results for different balance periods.
  • Modify your Report Designer payslip layout to include pay balance information.
You can't use the
Maintain Payslip Configuration
 task to display payroll balances on worker payslips.
Which values do you want to include in the pay balance?
When creating a pay balance, you can determine which calculations to include in the balance.
When creating a pay balance, you can return results based on a worktag value such as a specific region or position.
For retroactive payroll results, you can configure pay balances to either:
  • Include all retro differences.
  • Only include retro differences when they're from a period that falls within the balance period.
  • Exclude all retro differences.
When you have related company relationships, you can include values from the worker's company or from related companies, or both.
How do you aggregate results for statutory reporting or calculations?
Workday delivers several read-only:
  • Pay balances.
  • Balance periods.
You can customize Workday-delivered pay balances by adding earnings and deductions to pay component group included in the pay balance.
When Workday delivers a balance period for statutory calculations, you can associate a custom pay balance with the Workday-owned balance period to provide inputs.
How do you want to use your pay balances with other calculations?
When creating custom calculations, you can use a pay balance as an operand. You can also add the pay balance as an override calculation for a PCRC in a memo earning and then reference the PCRC result in a calculation.
Workday always includes the current gross-to-net calculation when displaying pay balances on payroll results. However, you can configure a pay balance to exclude current gross-to-net values in calculations that reference the pay balance.

Recommendations

To ensure correct pay balance values, only include position-based pay components in a pay balance using worktag filtering based on position worktags.
For Payroll for the UK, Workday recommends associating UK Payroll ID worktags with pay balances to ensure accurate reporting to HMRC.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

You can't configure Workday to display a pay balance for only some workers in a pay group. You can display each pay balance for all or none.
You can't effective-date pay balance configurations. Create a new pay balance rather than edit existing balances to avoid impacting calculations and reports that reference the balance.
When displaying payroll balance amounts on worker results, Workday doesn't display a negative sign for negative amounts.
You can't edit pay balances delivered by Workday.
Workday doesn't store pay balances for prior periods but instead recalculates balances when you run a report or view a page. To retrieve the balance from a prior period, create a balance period based on the prior period start and end dates.
You can't configure eligibility for pay balances. Workday automatically calculates payroll balances for workers who:
  • Are in a pay group associated with the country of the balance.
  • Have earnings that contribute to the balance.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domains
Consideration
Set Up: Payroll (Calculations - Payroll Specific)
 in the Core Payroll functional area.
Enables you to create pay balances.
  • Set Up: Calculations - Generic
     in the Core Payroll functional area.
  • Set Up: Time Off (Calculations - Generic)
     in the Time Off and Leave functional area.
Enables you to create balance periods.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
All Pay Balances
Use to:
  • Browse for existing pay balances in your tenant that you can reuse.
  • Verify the consistency of configurations across multiple pay balances.
  • View which calculations a pay balance impacts.
Tenant Analyzer
Use to identify potential issues when configuring or referencing pay balances.
You can use these report data sources:
  • All Pay Balances for Payroll
     to report on payroll balance configurations.
  • Earnings/Deductions Payroll Balances for Organizations
     to report on the value of individual pay balances.
There are also multiple ways to report on aggregated values of payroll results that don't rely directly on pay balances. Examples:
  • Create matrix or composite reports.
  • Map balance periods to payroll results.
  • Map report fields to balance periods.
  • Run the
    Pay Balance Summary
     standard report.

Integrations

You can use these web services to load or retrieve in pay balances in bulk:
  • Get Pay Balances
  • Put Pay Balance

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Balance periods
Balance periods determine the period of time over which to aggregate calculations.
Payroll history
Payroll balances can take into account payroll history amounts that fall in the balance period.
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.