Setup Considerations: Payroll History
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Payroll History. 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
Payroll history is a record of payments made to your employees before you started using Workday Payroll. You load this data into Workday to establish starting balances for employees.
Business Benefits
Payroll history increases accuracy in payroll calculations by enabling you to include previous pay details for your employees. You can use payroll history to incorporate data from external sources, providing more flexibility in your payroll calculations.
Use Cases
To ensure accurate payroll calculations, you can load historical payroll data from external, or legacy, systems. Example: You start using Workday Payroll part way through the financial year so require payroll history to reconcile the current tax year.
Loading the data enables you to include payroll history in year-to-date calculations. For Canada, the UK, and the U.S., Workday also enables you to include quarter-to-date calculations.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
How many times do you want to load payroll history? | Workday recommends that you load history at least twice. Example, into a test area and then into your live area in Workday.
Ensure you can repeat the load with the same parameters and data each time to avoid introducing errors. Load the history as at the final pay period in your legacy payroll system. |
I'll start using payroll from the beginning of a new tax year, do I need to load any history? | Yes, if you have any pay-related items that don't fall within a single tax year.
Examples include:
|
Do you have any employees with multiple historical records in the same company? | Workday recommends that you sum up an employee's data, from their latest period of employment, to load correctly. Instead of totals for every payroll run, provide summed values.
For Payroll for the UK only, when an employee has multiple periods of employment, you should load the summed history for each employment period. Example. For an employee who was hired, terminated, and rehired, load 2 periods of history. Each period of employment has its own related payroll ID and year to date payroll amount. |
Which pay periods do you need to load history for? | Workday doesn't restrict you from loading multiple periods. However, to prevent possible gaps or overrides in the data, it's good practice to load and calculate history in period sequence order.
For Payroll for the U.S. only, Workday recommends that you load payroll history for the current tax year only. For completed quarters, load history by quarter. Where you have partial quarters, load history by pay period. For Payroll for Canada, France, and the UK, due to the potential time and effort to extract, load, and reconcile payroll history, Workday recommends that you load 1 history record per period of employment. Each record includes year to date values covering the tax periods within that period of employment, instead of loading history records for each pay period within the tax year. |
For Payroll for Australia, do you process payroll calculations that require a worker's pay history to calculate accurately? | Load workers' YTD amounts for:
If you aren't loading full YTD pay history, consider using memo earnings to load the YTD amounts against, to avoid impact on STP reporting. |
For Payroll for Australia, how will you ensure that your transferred YTD figures don't result in duplicate STP reporting? | Due to the potential time and effort to extract, load, and reconcile payroll history and mapping of legacy payroll items against category in Workday, Workday recommends that you only load the non-reportable pay-related items required to support calculations that rely on payroll history.
If you decide to load history for STP reportable items:
|
Recommendations
To improve performance and reduce the amount of checking to do after loading data, Workday recommends that you only load the historical data required for current payroll calculations and reporting.
To ensure that any historical data that affects current pay is available, Workday recommends loading historical payroll payments before running your first pay calculation. Example: Employee loan repayments for loans that still have outstanding balances.
When loading history as a result of an acquisition:
- For Payroll for Australia, Canada, France, and the U.S., create a separate pay group for employees paid by the acquired organization. This pay group enables you to keep the employees separate for auditing until you've checked all their history data correctly loaded into Workday. After loading their payroll history, move them to the pay group they'll belong to in the new organization.
- For Payroll for the UK only, when loading history as a result of an acquisition, use your sandbox preview to test and reconcile the payroll history. After you confirm that all data loaded correctly, replicate your actions in your Workday production tenant.
To prevent errors or omissions in pay group reconciliation reports, load payroll history before recording that employees are terminated or placed on leave.
After loading your history data, audit employees' records to ensure that their Period End Date is after their Hire Date of Employee.
After loading, audit employees to ensure that they are in the tenant. Example: Compare names/ID to their Employee ID using a report from the tenant.
Requirements
Before running your first pay calculation in Workday:
- For Payroll for the U.S. only, if you’re starting midquarter or midyear, load historical payments from your external, or legacy, payroll system.
- For Payroll for Canada, France, and the UK, if you’re starting midyear, load historical payments from your external, or legacy, payroll system.
For each external, or legacy, payroll ID that you load, you must assign a Workday ID, such as an employee ID, to be able to run a history payment for the employee.
Limitations
You can add or correct payroll history at any time. However adding or changing historical results for an employee can impact calculations and results that use their historical balances.
For Payroll for Australia, changing historical results for an employee can cause incorrect STP reporting.
After you complete payroll history, you can change the completed history manually on an employee by employee basis. If you need to correct details for multiple employees after loading history, you can load a correction history file. The correction file contains the differences between the original, completed payroll history file and the correct values that should be held in Workday.
Before modifying payroll history for 1 employee, using
Run History Payment for Worker
:
- For Payroll for Australia, assign an AUS pay group before loading a payroll ID and running the history payment.
- For Payroll for the UK, assign a UK pay group before loading a payroll ID and running the history payment
Tenant Setup
No impact.
Security
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Pay Calculation (History): Ad Hoc Actions in the Core Payroll functional area. | Enables you to record or correct payroll history for 1 employee. |
Process: Load, Calculate, Cancel, Complete History in the Core Payroll functional area. | Enables you to mass load employees' payroll history. |
Worker Data: Payroll (Company Specific) - UK in the UK Payroll functional area. | For Payroll for the UK only, enables you to load history for:
|
Business Processes
No impact.
Reporting
Run the
Pay Calculation Processing Report
to process history payments. You can use the search facets to filter and apply these mass actions for the selected history payment results on the report:
- Cancel
- Complete
- Recalculate
Integrations
You can use these web services to mass upload and retrieve employees' pay history:
- Get_Payroll_History_Payments
- Import_Payroll_History_Payment
- Put_Payroll_History_Payment
For Payroll for the UK only, you can also use these web services:
- Get_Payroll_Holiday_Pay_History
- Get_Payroll_SSP_History
- Get_Pensions_Auto_Enrolment_External_Assessment_History
- Import_Payroll_Holiday_Pay_History
- Put_Payroll_SSP_History
- Put_Pensions_Auto_Enrolment_External_Assessment_History
Connections and Touchpoints
Payroll connects to several other areas within Workday. Depending on the parts of Workday that you use, check or set up details in different areas when you load payroll history.
Touchpoint | Consideration |
|---|---|
Absence | Review:
|
Benefit Plans | To enable Workday to process contributions and payments through payroll, map any existing benefit plans to payroll earnings and deductions.
Check any enrollment rules that control deduction start and end dates so they synchronize with payroll. |
Compensation | Review your list of compensation elements to ensure that they’re mapped to earnings.
Ensure that compensation elements and plans exist for all earnings that payroll expects to be handled through compensation instead of payroll input. |
Human Capital Management | Review any HCM business processes to determine if steps for payroll need to be:
|
Time Tracking | Associate time calculation tags with earnings or deductions to use approved time blocks as inputs when paying employees. |
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.