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Last Updated: 2025-08-22
Setup Considerations: Payroll Forward Accruals

Setup Considerations: Payroll Forward Accruals

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of payroll forward accruals. 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

Payroll forward accruals provide you the ability to estimate payroll costs through the end of the financial reporting period for pay periods spanning multiple financial reporting periods. Example:
  • Financial reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2020-12-31
  • Pay period: 2020-12-14 to 2020-12-27
Workday estimates payroll expenses that occur between 2020-12-28 and 2020-12-31.

Business Benefits

Payroll forward accruals enable you to:
  • Reduce manual calculations.
  • Close financial periods before you've completed payroll.
  • Report accurate financials.

Use Cases

You can use forward accruals to calculate:
  • Earnings
  • Employer Paid Taxes
  • Employer Paid Benefits
  • Fringe Benefit Expense

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Can you exclude the earnings that you don't want to accrue?
You can use the
Exclude from Forward Accrual
check box from the
Non-Effective Dated
 tab on the
Create Earning
 or
Edit Earning
 task.
Can you update forward accruals configuration for a pay period with completed payroll results?
You can't update the forward accrual configuration for on-cycle payments, when a pay period has completed payroll results. To update in-progress payroll results, use these tasks:
  • Run Pay Accounting
    .
  • Run Payroll Fringe Benefits Accounting
    , if you accrue fringe benefits (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
How do you include employer-paid benefits in your forward accruals?
To ensure that you include employer-paid expenses in forward accruals, you must:
  • Add
    Employer Paid Benefits
     to the Employer Paid Benefits pay component group.
  • Use the same Employer Paid Benefits pay component group to calculate relevant run categories.
Can you exclude employer-paid expenses that you don't want to accrue?
You can use the
Maintain Payroll Accounting Options
 task to exclude specific employer-paid benefits or taxes.
What account posting rules do you need to configure?
You can configure any of these account posting rules to use a different ledger account and resulting worktag for the debit forward accrual journals:
  • Payroll Earnings
  • Payroll Expense
  • Fringe Benefit Expense (CAN, FRA, UK, USA)
You can configure these account posting rules and use the
Forward Accrual
dimension for the credit forward accrual journals:
  • Payroll Forward Accrual
  • Fringe Benefit Recovery (CAN, FRA, UK, USA)

Recommendations

Workday recommends you to set up forward accruals at the beginning of a fiscal year. You can configure forward accruals when you set up period schedules.

Requirements

Workday requires you to create and open the current and next ledger year periods.

Limitations

You can't forward accrue:
  • Retro earnings.
  • Hours.
  • Payroll accounting adjustments.
  • Off-cycle payments (On-demand additional, On-demand replacement, and manual).
You can't use midperiod costing for forward accruals.

Tenant Setup

You can use the
Maintain Payroll Accounting Options
 task to:
  • Enable forward accruals for fringe benefit expense.
  • Disable forward accrual costing to worker defaults when employer-paid statutory taxes over allocate.

Security

Domains
Considerations
  • Set Up: Payroll - Pay Group Specific
     domain in Core Payroll functional area.
  • Set Up: Payroll Interface
     in the Payroll Interface functional area.
  • Set Up: Pay On-Demand
     in the Core Payroll functional area
  • Set Up: Period Schedule
     in the Projects functional area.
  • Set Up: Time Tracking
     domain in Time Tracking functional area
Enables access to the
Create Period Schedule
 or
Edit Period Schedule
 task to set up :
  • Period schedules.
  • Forward accruals.
  • Pay on-demand.
  • Time tracking.
Security:
Set Up: Payroll (Calculations - Payroll Specific)
 in Core Payroll functional area.
Enables access to theses tasks:
  • Create Earning
     or
    Edit Earning
  • Create Pay Component Group
  • Maintain Payroll Accounting Options
  • Set Up: Accounting Rules
     in the Common Financial Management functional area.
  • Set Up: Payroll - Company Specific (Accounting)
     in the Core Payroll functional area.
Enables access to the
View Account Posting Rules Set
 report.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

You can run the
View Period Schedule
 report to verify the forward accruals configuration for all the pay periods you've scheduled.

Integrations

You can use these web services to load or retrieve period schedules:
  • Put Period Schedule
  • Get Period Schedules

Connections and Touchpoints

When you enable forward accruals for fringe benefit expenses, Workday uses the payroll commitment rules that you've configured to calculate the fringe benefit forward accruals.
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.