Skip to main content
Documentation
Documentation
Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-05
Reference: Payroll Accounting and Payslips Capabilities

Reference: Payroll Accounting and Payslips Capabilities

You can view high-level feature descriptions for the capabilities in this product area.
Not all Payroll features are available in all countries, depending on local requirements and conditions. Example: French requirements related to payslip information, retention, and access.

Accounting Flexibility

Provides the ability to:
  • Configure account posting rules, associated with a company, to direct where transaction journals post in the company ledger accounts.
  • Override the accounting date for a period. Include pay types for payroll accounting adjustments.
  • Generate reversal journals when canceling pay results.
  • Specify how to allocate employee earnings and employer-paid expenses to costing organizations and locations.
  • Exclude negative results from employer-paid expense costing. Assign costing allocations for employer-paid expenses.
  • Cost applicable employer-paid expenses to a worker's organization.
  • Use forward accruals to create an estimated payroll accrual and fringe benefit, based on proration of a payroll result.
  • Identify earnings on journal lines that relate to fringe benefits for payroll commitments.
  • Cost payroll expenses to multiple related companies.
  • Consolidate payroll journals before sending results to the ledger.
  • Automatically split accounting entries when cost allocations change midperiod.
  • Enter adjustments to modify payroll journal lines on a completed result.
  • Create validations to prevent or warn users from submitting costing allocations with invalid details.
  • Automatically apply costings from a retro payroll period.
  • Define attributes for salary caps so that payroll expenses don't exceed specified maximum costing values on sponsored awards.
    This feature requires Workday Grants Management.

Commitments / Obligations / Budget Checking

Provides the ability to:
  • Project fiscal-year compensation and fringe benefits for filled and unfilled positions.
  • Report on budgetary balances to compare position budgets against commitments, obligations, actuals, and remaining balances.
  • Control how Workday prorates commitments, obligations, and related fringe for periods crossing a fiscal year.
  • Define percentage brackets for the fringe benefit portion of payroll commitments and obligations.
  • Estimate fringe benefit expenses, through the end of a financial reporting period, when a payroll period spans multiple reporting periods.
  • Include forward accrual and reversal in a budget check.
  • Create and process commitments for up to 5 future fiscal years.
  • Initiate payroll commitments, for filled and unfilled jobs, in the fiscal year.
  • Set up rules for when Workday generates commitments for filled and unfilled positions.

Grants

Provides the ability to indicate how to manage grants within a processing pay period and follow grant sponsor guidelines for workers paid on grants.
This feature requires Workday Grants Management.

Payments

Provides the ability to:
  • Reconcile bank statements against a matching item in an account record.
  • Manage payments and one-time and recurring deductions for workers.
  • Escheat uncashed or unclaimed manual or check payments.
  • Display customized help text for payment election fields.
  • Enable employees to create and edit their payment elections options on a desktop or mobile device.
  • Accept numerous different currencies to settle payments, and settle payments using multiple currencies.
  • Set error or warning messages on specific payment conditions.
  • Add payment elections as an action step to collect bank information from new users.
  • Define payment options for users to set their preferred country, currency, payment type, payment method, and distribution options.
  • Define payment election rules, for additional countries or currencies, for international workers.
  • Enable employees to create and edit their payment election options.
  • Export payroll data from Workday to an external check printing or payment service.
  • Send details of checks issued, to a financial institution, for fraud prevention purposes.
  • Preauthorize bank accounts by verifying account and routing information.
  • Use a dashboard as a single place to access reports related to account settlement.
  • Create settlement runs to settle unpaid open items and pending payments.
  • Supports secure updates by requiring users to verify existing bank details before modifying payment elections or bank information.

Payslips

Provides the ability to:
  • Combine payslips for a worker with multiple jobs across related companies.
  • Create a dashboard of payslip information for employee use.
  • Add and modify messages to display on printed payslips.
  • Override a worker's current payslip delivery method.
  • Provide workers with a digital PDF copy of their payslips.
  • Generate a single PDF file containing multiple payslips.
  • Schedule a time to print PDF payslips in bulk.
  • Use preformatted layouts for checks and advice slips.
Provides the ability to customize:
  • Advice slips.
  • Checks.
    Not supported in Payroll for the UK.
  • Payslips.
Provides the ability to grant employee access, on a mobile device, to:
  • Access a digital PDF copy of their payslips.
  • View details of their current and year-to-date pay.
  • View their pay information as tables and graphs.

Period Activity Pay

Supports paying employees for activities they perform during a fixed period.

Salary Over The Cap

Provides the ability to set a limit on payroll expenses so they don't exceed sponsor salary over the cap requirements.
This feature requires Workday Grants Management.