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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-05-30
Setup Considerations: Payroll Audits

Setup Considerations: Payroll Audits

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of payroll audits. 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 audits enable you to:
  • Audit any past or current pay period.
  • Verify that payroll results are correct.
  • Spot and fix issues before completing payroll.
You can configure audit rules for a specific subset of workers and group sets of audit rules to run at the same time.

Business Benefits

The Workday payroll auditing process enables you to:
  • More easily analyze and act on audit exceptions.
  • Set the severity of audit exceptions to Informational, Warning, or Critical.
  • Configure audit assignment alerts using the reporting notification framework within Workday.
  • More effectively research and collaborate on the resolution of audit exceptions by assigning audit exceptions to individuals for resolution.
  • Reduce the risk of exposing sensitive worker data by controlling which audit-related data to share with collaborators.
  • Change the status of audit exceptions and add comments for easier tracking.
  • Track audit exceptions and assignees through delivered reports.
  • View audit exception histories and comments.

Use Cases

You can use audit rules to:
  • Ensure accurate overtime payment by identifying workers with overtime hours.
  • Find workers in a specific location that have year-to-date (YTD) retirement savings eligible wages that are close to the contribution limit.
  • Prevent errors by identifying workers with unusually high or low payroll results.
You can compare:
  • An in-progress period with any completed period.
  • Any 2 completed periods.
  • Results by pay group, period summary, and worker.
Example: Configure an audit that reports base pay variations greater than 5% for a pay group.

Questions to Consider

Question
Considerations
What kind of rules do you want to create?
Consider what you're trying to identify before completing payroll. You can create rules:
  • With a mixture of worker eligibility filters and payroll results for the current period.
  • To compare any in-progress or completed prior periods in Workday.
Do you want to run audits for workers in different countries?
Audits rules and audit run groups are country-specific, so you can run different sets of rules for different enabled countries.
How many audit rules do you want to group?
The more audit rules you group and the broader the rules are, the longer the audit can take. If there’s a noticeable performance impact, you can inactivate some of the rules.

Recommendations

Workday recommends that you:
  • Schedule the
    Run Pay Calculation
     task to run before scheduled payroll audit runs to ensure that the audit can run successfully.
  • Add the
    Payroll Audit Exception Summary
     worklet to the
    Pay Cycle Command Center
     dashboard to have easy access to it from the dashboard.
  • Don't edit an audit rule with existing exceptions as it can cause the existing audit rule to behave unexpectedly.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

You can't identify workers to audit based on their:
  • Job family.
  • Name or ID.
  • Type.
  • Active status.
  • Age group.
  • Hired as of date.
  • Tax elections.
  • Compensation change.
Audit rules don't support worktags.
You can't:
  • Copy audit rules.
  • Audit for arrears.
  • Run more than 50 audit details at a time. Audit details are each line within the audit rule.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

These domains in the Core Payroll functional area:
Domains
Considerations
Set Up: Payroll (Reporting)
Enables you to set up payroll audit rules and payroll audit run groups.
Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Audits)
Enables you to run payroll audit rules and payroll audit run groups.
Reports: Payroll Audit Exception (Assignee)
Enables you to assign users to payroll audit exceptions so they can view audit exception details. Restricted to unconstrained security groups.

Business Processes

Workday recommends that you add the
Payroll Audit Run
 task as a step to the
Pay Cycle Event
 business process after the
Payroll Run Pay Calculation
 step.

Reporting

Report
Security
Description
My Payroll Audit Exceptions
Reports: Payroll Audit Exception (Assignee)
Displays audit exceptions assigned to a specific user. The user can review details, update the status of an exception, comment, and reassign the exception.
Payroll Audit Exceptions
Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Audits)
Provides granular details that you can use to analyze and track the progress of audit exceptions that have manageable statuses.
Payroll Audit Exception Details
Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Audits)
Accessed by clicking
View Details
 on the
Payroll Audit Exceptions
 report. Displays details for the selected pay period and pay group.
Payroll Audit Exception Summary
Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Audits)
Enables you to drill-down on the status and severity values and view individual audit exception details. You can also configure this report as a worklet on the
Pay Cycle Command Center
 dashboard.

Integrations

No impact.

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.