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Last Updated: 2026-03-13
Setup Considerations: Payroll Dashboards

Setup Considerations: Payroll Dashboards

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of payroll dashboards. 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 dashboards consolidate payroll data and actionable items in 1 place. Workday delivers these preconfigured dashboards:
  • Pay Cycle Command Center: To review and manage payroll data for 1 or multiple pay periods.
  • Payroll Compliance Updates: To review compliance updates.
  • Pay: To enable workers to access their payroll data.
  • For Payroll for France, DSN Command Center: To manage and track your generated DSNs, verify reported payroll data, and access DSN tasks.
  • For Payroll for Canada and the U.S., Payroll Year End: To access common year-end tasks, review past-year statistics and year-end forms, and run year-end business processes.
You can also create an unlimited number of custom dashboards.

Business Benefits

Payroll dashboards help to increase operational efficiency and save time by enabling you to:
  • Review strategic payroll trends and metrics and identify issues that require action.
  • Run tasks and reports most relevant to you from 1 location.
  • Quickly assess the payroll status of your company with a payroll process overview.
  • Review delivered and future compliance updates in 1 location.
  • Enable workers to engage with their payroll and find answers without having to ask pay partners using employee self-service (ESS).

Use Cases

Use payroll dashboards to:
  • Compare pay periods to confirm that payroll results are consistent.
  • Track trends, drill down on pay components, and investigate anomalies.
  • Plan for compliance updates that impact pay to notify workers in advance or address their questions.
  • Reconcile pay results with the number of workers.
  • Track amounts that go into suspense accounts.
Enable workers to run the Pay dashboard to understand:
  • Why their gross-to-net is the same but their holiday pay is different.
  • How much they contribute for taxes or voluntary deductions.
  • Confirm a compensation change.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Which countries do pay partners process payroll for?
You can preconfigure fields to display by country and relevance to pay partners on each dashboard. Example: You can display certain run categories and pay periods.
You can also provide pay partners access to configure their own dashboards.
What information do you want to display on the Workday Home page?
You can configure the Home page to increase operational efficiency by:
  • Selecting which worklets to display and in which order by role.
  • Renaming existing worklets using the
    Configure Home Page Content
     task.
  • Grouping dashboards by usage frequency.
What data do you want to verify when running payroll?
The Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard contains preconfigured worklets that provide an overview of payroll data relevant to each processing phase. You can:
  • Compare trends between pay periods and identify anomalies.
  • Verify the status of payroll results and drill down on them.
  • Review retro differences in earnings and deductions.
  • Review debit and credit amounts for each ledger account.
  • Reconcile payroll results with payments.
You can also configure custom worklets that display data from custom reports. Example: You can copy the
Payroll Input Not Processed
 report and configure it to display on the Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard.
How do you keep track of payroll processing tasks?
The Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard contains preconfigured worklets that provide access to tasks and reports grouped by payroll processing phases. Examples:
  • Preparation, such as running retro pay calculations and mass importing payroll inputs.
  • Processing, such as running and completing payroll and running reports to audit payroll results.
  • Post complete, such as running accounting and creating settlement runs.
  • Manage worker data, such as assigning pay groups and adding tax elections by country.
You can edit the Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard or create a custom one to meet your organizational needs. Example: You can:
  • Reorder or group tasks and reports based on usage.
  • Add or remove worklets.
  • Configure standard and custom reports as worklets.
  • Add external links such as regulatory documents.
  • Add announcements and menus for specific groups based on condition rules.
How do you learn about payroll compliance updates?
The Payroll Compliance Updates dashboard provides compliance information for each supported payroll country, listing:
  • Delivered updates related to taxes and court orders or withholding orders, to help you assess whether you need to change the configured pay component. Example: Unchanged payroll results can suggest you need to create new taxable deductions.
  • Upcoming updates related to taxes and court orders or withholding orders, to help you plan communications to impacted workers based on the affected population size.
  • Updates related to lookup tables and minimum wages.
You can drill down on each update to review the impacted workers, pay components, or the effective date.
When you process payroll for multiple countries, consider configuring a different preset effective date for each country to account for differences in tax year dates.
What are your regulatory reporting requirements? (CAN, FRA, USA)
For Payroll for France, you can configure the DSN Command Center dashboard to:
  • Manage and track your generated DSNs.
  • Verify reported payroll data.
  • Quickly access related DSN tasks in Workday.
For Payroll for Canada and the U.S., you can configure the Payroll Year End dashboard for easy access to:
  • Routine year-end tasks.
  • Current estimates for year-end forms.
  • Past year-end form statistics.
  • Year-end business processes.
  • Statuses of business processes and year-end forms, and the name of the person responsible for the next step.
What information do you want to make available to workers?
The Pay dashboard contains preconfigured worklets that workers access through ESS to view:
  • Payslips and payment dates.
  • Comparisons of earnings and deductions between 2 pay periods to identify trends and review pay distribution.
  • Pay history over the last 3 months as configured on worker payslips.
  • Earning and deduction history over the last 3 months.
The dashboard displays only pay component or pay history results for workers who have payroll results for the previous 3 months.
You can add routine tasks to the Pay dashboard based on business needs. Example: You can enable workers to:
  • Elect voluntary deductions.
  • Request time off.
  • Update payment elections.
  • Request pay on-demand (USA).
When processing payroll externally, you can configure an intersection security group to restrict access to the dashboard to Workday employees.
You can configure the dashboard to enable workers to select:
  • The country to display. Workday displays the primary job country by default for workers in multiple countries.
  • Which earnings and deductions to display. Example: Base pay plus bonus or hourly and overtime pay.

Recommendations

To ensure that the dashboards display the most up-to-date data, before accessing payroll admin dashboards:
  • Configure continuous payroll calculations and enable an automatic stop to save the step of pausing the calculations.
  • To ensure that pay calculations include all updates, verify integrations and run a full payroll recalculation.
Access the Payroll Compliance Updates dashboard at least once per week and before processing regular pay to plan for compliance changes.
For best ESS experience, when you configure the Pay dashboard:
  • Set the worklet size to 1X for
    Recent Payslips
     and
    Compare Periods
    .
  • Set the worklet size to 1X for
    Earnings/Deductions History
     and
    Pay History
    , especially for workers on weekly or biweekly pay periods who have more pay results.
  • Sign in to Workday using proxy access to verify the layout and data displayed.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

You can't access cross-functional reports, such as Time Tracking dashboards, on the Pay dashboard.

Tenant Setup

Configure the
Edit Tenant Setup - Payroll
 task to set:
  • Selectable default countries on the dashboards.
  • Payslip options for ESS using the Pay dashboard.

Security

Domains
Considerations
Business Process Administration
 and
Manage: Business Process Definitions
 in the System functional area. (CAN, US)
Enable users to run year-end business processes from the Payroll Year End dashboard.
Management Dashboard: Pay Cycle Command Center
 in the Core Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard.
Management Dashboard: Payroll Year End
 in the USA Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the Payroll Year End dashboard.
Management Dashboard: Payroll Year End
 in the CAN Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the Payroll Year End dashboard.
Manage: All Custom Reports
 in the System functional area.
Enables users to access custom reports regardless of the owner using the dashboards.
Process: DSN (Run) - FRA
 in the FRA Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the DSN Command Center dashboard.
Security Configuration
 in the System functional area.
Enables users to manage proxy access policies to verify the Pay dashboard layout.
Self-Service: My Pay Dashboard
 in the Core Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the Pay dashboard through ESS. Each self-service task requires appropriate security access. Example: To view and print payslips, configure the
Self-Service: Payroll (My Payslips)
 domain in the Core Payroll functional area.
Set Up: Tenant Setup: Worklets
 in the System functional area.
Enables users to configure dashboards.
Set Up: Payroll (Taxes View)
in the Core Payroll functional area.
Enables users to access the Payroll Compliance Updates dashboard and other data related to taxes.

Business Processes

You can add tasks to the dashboards to initiate business processes. Example: You can add a task for the
Request Time Off
 business process to the Pay dashboard.
For Payroll for the U.S., you can only run the
W-2 Year End Process
business process from the Payroll Year End dashboard.
For Payroll for Canada, you can only run these year-end business processes from the Payroll Year End dashboard:
  • RL-1 Year End Process
  • T4 Year End Process

Reporting

Reports or Dashboards
Considerations
Custom Report Exceptions by Owner
 report
Identify and troubleshoot exceptions for reports that you enable as worklets but that are unavailable on dashboards.
Global Library
 report
Add this report to the Pay Cycle Command Center and Payroll Compliance Updates dashboards to view sample configurations and common compliance requirements. Workday delivers the report with 2 types of configurations:
  • Statutory guidance configurations that Workday delivers and maintains. Example: State minimum wages, tax calculations, withholding and court order data, address and name formats.
  • Sample configurations.
Maintain Dashboards
 report
Create custom dashboards, and add to and edit preconfigured dashboards.
Payroll Compliance Update Documentation
 report
Add this report to the Payroll Compliance Updates dashboard to review compliance updates in Workday by country. The report includes links to external regulatory sites.
Settlement dashboard
Review settlement activities in your organization such as the unsettled payroll payments by amount.

Integrations

When workers belong to external pay groups, you can display their external pay data on the Pay dashboard by:
  • Enabling the corresponding domains for third-party payroll.
  • Using the
    External Payroll Documents
     integration and the
    External Payroll Results Inbound
     integration.
Examples: External pay results, payslips, or tax documents.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Retro pay calculations
When you run retro for terminations or hires in prior periods where workers have no payroll activity, Workday generates pay results of zero for those periods. The ESS Pay dashboard hides payslips associated with these retro events.
Tasks and reports
On Workday-delivered or custom dashboards, you can add:
  • Reports as optional or required worklets.
  • Tasks as menu items for quick access.
Example: You can configure the
Payroll Audit Exception Summary
 report as a worklet on the Pay Cycle Command Center dashboard. You can then drill down on the status and severity values and view individual audit exception 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.