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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Worktag Balancing for Payroll

Setup Considerations: Worktag Balancing for Payroll

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of worktag balancing for payroll. 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

You can use worktag balancing to manage and track operational transactions, and to balance operational journals.
With worktag balancing, you can balance transactions and journals based on 1 or more types of worktags:
  • Company.
  • Optional worktags.
  • Organizational types.
  • Primary worktags.
  • Worktags with financial balancing rules.
You can set up rules to determine which balancing worktags to apply to the offset side of the operational transaction journal.

Business Benefits

You can use worktag balancing to balance all transactions and journals by company, eliminating manual processing and balancing efforts.

Use Cases

You can use worktag balancing to balance transactions and journals by:
  • Organization type, such as cost center
  • Primary worktag, such as fund.
  • Optional worktag, such as project.

Questions to Consider

Question
Considerations
How do you want to assign worktag balancing for payroll journals?
You can configure to assign a balancing worktag to:
  • The deductions portion and net accumulation of gross-to-net payroll, including forward accruals.
  • Fringe benefit charges (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
You can set up which worktag to use by:
  • Creating transaction rules.
  • Defining which worktags to use for your tenant.
Do you have retroactive transactions?
Enabling worktag balancing doesn't trigger retroactive processing.
Do you want to require all transactions to have the worktag?
In worktag balancing, you can set up:
  • Optional worktags.
  • Primary worktags, which are required on all transactions.
You can only have 1 primary worktag that's always required on a transaction.
You don't need to set up primary worktags in order to use optional worktags.
Workday requires transactions to balance based on the worktags you specify for your tenant.
Do you have bank accounts for your worktag balancing?
You can specify fund worktag balancing values for bank account transfers. If the values are different, Workday generates
Due To
 and
Due From
 entries for the Bank Account Transfers operational journal.
What kind of transactions do you have?
Workday balances all transactions that generate accounting. If you define a primary worktag dimension, it's required on all transactions.
You can use optional worktag balancing for accounting results for these transactions:
  • Commitments and obligations.
  • Forward accruals.
  • Fringe benefit actuals (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
  • Fringe commitments and obligations (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
  • Liquidations.
  • Payroll actuals.
Do you have a large volume of data for payroll?
Payroll actuals and commitment accounting produce a large volume of data. Enabling balancing worktags will increase the data volume and can impact performance. For each optional balancing worktag, weigh the benefit against the performance impact of creating another credit for each debit.
Do you have costing allocations?
These costing allocations supersede the optional balancing worktag:
  • Earning and employee deduction.
  • Employer paid expense.
  • Fringe benefit recovery (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
How do you want to use worktags to balance your fringe benefit actuals? (CAN, FRA, UK, USA)
You can either:
  • Set up fringe benefit actuals so the worktags balance by inheriting values from the operational side of the transaction.
  • Set up a rule on the
    Worktag Balancing Transaction Rule Set
     task for transactions to specifies which balancing worktag to use. Generate due to and due from accounting journal entries, creating balanced books. Example: If you balance by fund, the rule enables you to settle and receive payments for a group of funds using a single specified fund.
Do you have payroll actuals?
You can set up worktag balancing rules for payroll accruals on the primary and optional balancing worktags.

Recommendations

  • Close the books for the current fiscal year and enable worktag balancing once the new fiscal year starts.
  • Complete all in-progress transactions and settle payments before you enable worktag balancing, such as:
    • Administration expense.
    • Commitments.
    • Facilities.
    • Forward accrual.
    • Fringe benefit (CAN, FRA, UK, USA).
    • Obligations.
    • Payroll accruals.
    • Payments.
  • Consider making Primary Worktag Balancing a required Position Assignment option.
  • Consider whether the benefit of Optional Worktag Balancing is worth the performance impact of creating additional journal lines.
  • For worker-related journals, consider enabling
    Default Related Worktags from Worker's Organization Assignments
     in the
    Maintain Worktag Type Precedences
     task if you want default worktags to come from a worker.

Requirements

After you enable worktag balancing, Workday balances all transactions that generate accounting. You’re required to have primary balancing worktag on all transactions.
If you have Expenses, ensure the ledger account balance nets to zero before you load beginning balance journals.

Limitations

  • You can only select up to 5 worktag types for optional worktag balancing.
  • You can’t change your primary balancing worktag once you balance your journals.
  • Once you enable worktag balancing, you can't disable it or change the worktag balancing type.
  • You might not be able to adjust a payroll result that completed prior to enabling primary worktag balancing. If the original result did not have the worktag balancing dimension, the journal will contain errors.

Tenant Setup

You can use the
Maintain Worktag Balancing Configuration
 task to set up tenant level configurations, such as:
  • Worktag type.
  • Transaction rule.
  • Company.
  • Optional balancing worktag.

Security

The
Set Up: Worktag Balancing
 domain on the Common Financial Management functional area enables you to set up worktag balancing configurations and rules.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
  • Find Journal Lines
  • Payroll Commitment Summary
  • View Journal
View and verify worktag balancing on your journals.
  • Balance Sheet Retained Earnings Reconciliation Summary
  • Cash to Bank Account Balances Reconciliation Exception Summary
  • Event Account Summary Report
  • Income Statement Retained Earnings Reconciliation Summary
  • Payroll Commitment to Commitment Reconciliation
Verify various balances by worktag or worktag hierarchy.
Financial Statement - Balance Sheet
Verify that the retained earning lines carry the balancing worktag value. Workday filters the retained earnings data by the selected worktag.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Expenses
If you use Expenses, ensure the ledger account balance nets to zero before you load beginning balance journals.
Financial Management
Workday Payroll shares primary and optional worktags with Financial Management. If you use Financial Management, you must set up financial rules for worktags during initial setup.
Payroll History
You can't modify historical transactions after enabling payroll balancing worktag and closing all periods. If you later reopen a period for adjustment, add new transactions as opposed to changing historic details.
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.