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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-02-06
Setup Considerations: Payroll Accounting Adjustments

Setup Considerations: Payroll Accounting Adjustments

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of payroll accounting adjustments. 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 accounting adjustments enable you to modify payroll journal lines after you complete payroll. You can make a net-zero adjustment when you have incorrect journal lines.
You can:
  • Adjust costing worktags.
  • Adjust 1 or more journal lines.
  • Override the costing company when you enable intercompany accounting.

Business Benefits

  • Decrease compliance risk by ensuring greater accuracy in financial reporting.
  • Workday notifies you when operational journals fail, helping you ensure that your adjustments are successful.

Use Cases

  • Adjust an employee's payroll accounting to split cost allocations between cost centers when the employee works a different percentage on a project than anticipated.
  • Make adjustments for 1 or multiple pay periods, and for distribution splits. When you add multiple pay periods, you can configure additional details, such as pay components payroll results, and positions.
  • Make adjustments for a pay period in the current year or the previous 7 years.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Can you make adjustments to a closed ledger period?
You can make adjustments in open ledger periods. To make adjustments to closed ledger periods, you must open the periods first.
When the period end date of your adjustment is in a closed ledger period, Workday:
  • Posts the adjustment journals in the next open period.
  • Sets the accounting date to the first day of this period.
What information do you want to collect for the adjustments?
You can add a
Complete Questionnaire
step on the
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
business process to collect additional information on adjustments.
When you create questionnaires for the adjustments, Workday recommends that you:
  • Attach only 1 questionnaire.
  • Assign only 1 role on the step.
Do you need to associate retro period information with your proposed accounting adjustments?
You can display retro periods on payroll accounting adjustments by selecting the
Enable Retro Period on Payroll Accounting Adjustments
check box on the
Maintain Payroll Accounting Options
task. You can specify which retro period to associate with your proposed adjustments and summary totals from the retro periods displayed on the current journal lines.

Recommendations

Workday recommends you check the accounting journal status before making adjustments to ensure that you don't run into errors.

Requirements

To create a payroll accounting adjustment, payroll must be complete for the employee's pay group and journal lines must be in posted status.You'll be unable to select the pay period for a worker on the
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustment
task if you create a payroll accounting adjustment when payroll isn't complete for their pay group or the journal lines aren't in posted status.

Limitations

You can’t:
  • Adjust hours.
  • Create validations for adjustments.
  • Directly adjust ledger accounts.
  • Make adjustments to fringe journal lines.
  • Mass create or load adjustments. You can only do 1 adjustment for 1 worker at a time.
  • Move amounts from 1 pay component or position to another.
  • Adjust historical payroll that's more than 7 years old.
  • Create a payroll accounting adjustment for a completed pay result if an effort certification for that worker and period is currently in progress.
Workday evaluates position-based account posting rule dimensions that affect payroll accounting adjustments based on the entry moment when the adjustment’s result was last calculated. If you create new account posting rule dimensions after the entry moment of the accounting adjustment, Workday can’t match the adjustment to the dimension and might post the adjustment to an incorrect account. To post the adjustment to the correct account, you can temporarily remove the dimension, and then rescind and resubmit the adjustment.

Tenant Setup

You can use the
Maintain Payroll Accounting Options
task to:
  • Configure both on-cycle and off-cycle as the default payroll result type.
  • Enable you to view the attachments added during the initial creation of the
    Effort Certification
    business process.
  • Display retro period information on payroll accounting adjustments.

Security

You can control the visibility of pay components on payroll accounting adjustments by creating a pay component security segment and segment-based security group.
This only impacts the pay components that the initiator of a payroll accounting adjustment can access during the initiating task. Workday doesn't apply segmented security to payroll accounting adjustments:
  • At any other time in the
    Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
    business process.
  • When a reviewer sends back adjustments during the
    Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
    business process.
  • When you initiate payroll accounting adjustments as a subprocess of an
    Effort Certification
    business process.
Domains
Considerations
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results (Results - Security based on Pay Component Security)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Organization (Accounting Results)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Accounting Results)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Worker (Results)
Enables access to the
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
task.
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Worker (Results)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Pay Group (Accounting Results)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results for Organization (Accounting Results)
  • Reports: Pay Calculation Results (Results - Security based on Pay Component Security)
  • Set Up: Payroll (Calculations - Payroll Specific)
Users with access on these domains in the Core Payroll functional area can initiate the
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustment
business process.

Business Processes

The
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
business process enables you to create adjustments and routing rules.
You can configure payroll accounting adjustments as a subprocess of the
Effort Certification
business process, making adjustments more efficient and accurate. You can start a
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustment
event, when:
  • The qualified effort certification event completes.
  • The event contains a costed change.
  • You select the
    Use Full Worktag
    option on the effort certification type.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
Payroll Result
report
Workday doesn't display adjustments directly on payroll actuals. Use the
Other Accounting
tab to view payroll accounting adjustment journals.
Workday creates a new journal for every adjustment.
Find Journal
report
You can use the Find Journals report to find journals created as a result of payroll accounting adjustments. You can filter for your adjustments by the
Payroll Accounting Adjustment
journal source.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

Feature
Considerations
Effort Certification, only Payroll for the U.S.
You can configure payroll accounting adjustments as a subprocess of the
Effort Certification
business process.
Payroll accounting adjustments only pick up lines changed with a
Costed Reason Code
in effort certification. Workday balances your journal lines when you integrate effort certification and payroll accounting adjustments.
While approving the
Create Payroll Accounting Adjustments
business process from My Tasks, you can verify if there's an effort certification event. Depending on your role-based security, you can either view or click the Effort Certification Event information link. You can click the link to view more details only when you have access to the
Reports: Manager (Effort Certification)
domain
Grants
Workday passes effort certification lines generated by grants to payroll accounting to generate payroll accounting adjustment entries.
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.