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

Setup Considerations: Custom Payroll Reports

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of custom payroll reports. 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 create custom payroll reports with specific fields, filters, worktags, and other criteria. You can create custom reports to return payroll data for individual workers or all employees for a specific range of dates. Your reports can include gross, net, taxes, earnings, deductions, and variances of pay results.

Business Benefits

Payroll custom reports enable you to:
  • Drill into payroll data to identify correlations or discrepancies, such as missing deductions or earnings.
  • Take action on payroll results, such as completing retro results.
  • Compare payroll result variances, such as earnings differences between the current and previous period.
  • Provide payroll data to nonpayroll users, such as earnings balances for a manager's employees.

Use Cases

  • You can use simple or advanced reports to analyze detailed information on a targeted set of data, such as tax totals for a pay period.
  • You can use a matrix report to summarize a large amount of data, such as pay group assignments.
  • You can use composite reports to view combined data from multiple sources, such as year-to-date, month-to-date, and quarter-to-date pay component variances.
  • You can use search reports to find a subset of data and take an action on it.

Questions to Consider

Question
Considerations
Is there a standard report that delivers most of the functionality you want?
You can use the
Copy Standard Report to Custom Report
 task to modify a standard report.
Do you know which data source to use for your custom report?
The data source that you select determines:
  • How quickly Workday returns results.
  • The primary business object.
  • The starting data set.
  • Which users can access the report.
  • Which users you can share the report with.
You can build custom payroll reports from a data source, such as
All Pay Balances for Payroll
. You can view all data sources on the
Data Sources
 report. Use indexed data sources whenever possible. Select filtered data sources such as
Workers by Organization
 or focused data sources such as
My Direct Reports
 to improve efficiency.
Workday eliminates non-indexed data sources from the selection list when you select the
Optimized for Performance
 check box on the
Create Custom Report
 task. To view and select from all data sources, clear the check box.
Will you use the report to transfer payroll data to a third-party service?
If you use Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) or Excel/CSV to transfer payroll data, consider using Studio integrations to export large amounts of data to third-party services.
Which roles in your organization need to access custom payroll reports?
You can use reports using organizational hierarchies, role-based permissions, and row-level security on custom reports. You can also secure by pay group, ensuring payroll partners can only view data for the pay groups they support.
Who can you share reports with?
You can share all report types, apart from simple reports, with authorized users and groups that have access to the data sources and data source filters. You can convert simple reports to advanced reports to share them. Once shared, users running the report can view the results filtered by their security. Example: If the user doesn't have security access to a report field, the data returned from the report field won’t be visible on the report.
You can use the:
  • View Security Groups for User
     report to see what security groups a user belongs to.
  • View Security for Securable Item
     report to see what security groups can access the securable item. Example: A data source or report field.
Do you need to share a custom report with nonpayroll users, such as managers or benefit partners?
You can restrict pay component access by creating dedicated security segments.
You can only apply pay component security segments to custom reports based on segmented data sources.
Do you need to transfer ownership of reports?
You can use the
Transfer Ownership of Custom Reports
 task.
Do you need to report on pay components and pay accumulations?
You can map pay components or pay accumulations to Workday-owned report fields. If you map more than 1 pay component to the same report field, Workday sums the component values and assigns the results to the report field.
Do you intend to report on balance periods?
Run the
Integration IDs
 report with the
Balance Period (Workday Owned)
 business object to view all balance periods that you can use on custom reports.
What calculated fields can you include in reports?
Use the
All Calculated Fields
 report to identify calculated fields for custom reports. If there isn’t a calculated field that meets your needs, use the
Create Calculated Field
 task. Example: If you want to find the worker's most recent completed payroll results, use the
Most Recent Completed Payroll Results
 report field. This report field returns the 3 most recently completed payroll results for a worker.
Do you need to make your payroll data easier to report on?
You can use custom or Workday-delivered worktags to more easily access information, filter searches, and analyze data in aggregated and summarized reports. You can use worktags for cost allocations or to tag pay components with supplemental information. You can assign worktags to the payroll result level or the payroll result line level.

Recommendations

For best performance, Workday recommends you to:
  • Use indexed Reporting Data Source (RDS) and filters where available.
  • Avoid using Do Not Use or DNU fields.
  • Leverage a consolidated report consisting of matrix reports and lookup fields and use together with indexed data sources and indexed field.
  • Use the business object with the most instances as your primary business object. Example: Use the
    Payroll Result Line
     business object before the
    Worker
     business object for a better performing report.
Reporting On
Recommendation
Pay balances
Use these standard report data sources:
  • Earning/Deduction Payroll Balances for Organization
  • Earning/Deduction Payroll Balances for Worker
  • Earning/Deduction Payroll Results for Organization (As of Sub Period End Date)
  • Earning/Deduction Payroll Results for Organization, Worker, Period and Date Range (As of Sub Period End Date)
  • Earning/Deduction Payroll Results for Worker (As of Sub Period End Date)
Ensure that you configure pay component security segments when using these report data sources.
Aggregated balance periods
If you don’t require worktag balance calculations, consider using these Workday-delivered reports:
  • Payroll Totals by Company
  • Payroll Totals by Company and Pay Group Detail
  • Payroll Totals by Company and Worker
  • Payroll Totals by Company Pay Group Detail and Worker
Earning, deduction, or pay component codes
For better performance, use the
Payroll Calculation
 indexed report field instead of these report fields:
  • Deduction
  • Earning
  • Pay Component Code
Payroll result lines and worker-related data
Use the
Payroll Result Lines
 data source for the report, and then specify the
Worker
 business object as a field on the report.

Requirements

To report on tenanted Earnings, Deductions, Pay Component Related Calculations, or Pay Accumulations, you must map the components to Workday-owned report fields. If you map more than one pay component to the same report field, Workday sums the component values and assigns the results to the report field.

Limitations

You can't use matrix or composite reports with RaaS integration.
Indexed data sources don’t currently support segmented security. Example: You create a report for a cost center manager using segmented security. The report sums payroll result lines by pay component. It returns the sum of all payroll result lines rather than just the sum of the payroll result lines to which the cost center manager has access.
Worktags, especially unindexed worktags, might negatively affect performance. When filtering by worktags, use standard indexed worktags for the best performance, such as:
  • Business Unit
  • Company
  • Cost Center
  • Location
  • Pay Group
  • Region

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domains
Considerations
Custom Report Creation
 in the System functional area.
Enables you to create and manage custom reports. This security grants modify privileges on reports in these domains:
  • Custom Report Management
  • Custom/Standard Report Copy
Manage: All Custom Reports
 in the System functional area.
Enables you to view, edit, and delete all custom reports, regardless of whether you’re the report owner.
When creating a custom report, you can only use data sources and report fields in the security domains to which you have access.

Business Processes

You can add custom reports as a step on relevant payroll business processes. Example: You can add custom reports to the
Pay Cycle Event
 business process.

Reporting

You can use these Workday-delivered reports and dashboards to track report usage in your tenant:
  • Report Administrator
     dashboard - Displays tasks and reports that help you manage the reports in your tenant.
  • Report Run History
     report - Displays how many times a report ran and details such as who ran the report and at what time.
Reports
Considerations
Calculated Field Exception Audit
Enables you to validate your calculated fields and identify errors.
Custom Report Exception Audit
Enables you to validate report definitions.
Custom Report Exceptions by Owner
Enables you to view exceptions for reports that:
  • Include terminated workers.
  • Are enabled as worklets but not available on dashboards.
  • Are temporary or past their deletion date.
  • Aren't shared.
  • Include items marked as
    Do Not Use
    .
Custom Reports I Can Run Exception Audit
Enables you to view custom reports with exceptions.
Reporting
 tab on the
Tenant Analyzer
You can use to identify custom reports that you can update to improve performance.

Integrations

For the best performance, use Workday-delivered integration cloud connectors, such as Check Print Connector and Payroll Journal Outbound Connector instead of RaaS.
When a custom report returns more than 50,000 lines, consider creating a Studio integration using Workday Web Services instead of a custom report or RaaS.

Connections and Touchpoints

Custom reports touch any product area that returns data from the primary business object and related business objects.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships across your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.