Workday Review - Great for HR, good for mid-sized/small organizations!
Updated July 14, 2016
Workday Review - Great for HR, good for mid-sized/small organizations!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Workday 23
Modules Used
- Human Capital Management
- Integration Cloud
- Payroll
Overall Satisfaction with Workday Human Capital Management
It is being used across the organization, to streamline business efforts with HR, Benefits, Payroll, and integrations with our student systems and other vendors, but provides us with a more flexible and modern system to manage our information among those systems.
- The flexibility of being a cloud-based system that users can log on from anywhere (including administrators) to use with a simple sign-in screen - no special downloads or certificates needed to access your data.
- The ability to customize (within the structure of the system) what users see and access, as well as the self-service capabilities for employees.
- Most actions and activities in Workday can be tracked as a "to-do", so you can follow up on something at a later time without forgetting about it.
- Finding employee data is fairly easy, the search tool is a great feature of Workday.
- The Payroll module is lacking some major reports "out of the box". For example, coming to Workday from a payroll service provider, we realized Workday doesn't have a clean Payroll Register or Payroll Summary report that can be used for audits or top-level reconciliation. We had to build custom reports to manage that, but most reports only output to Excel, so Workday lacks some clean PDF versions that satisfy Auditors needs when looking to compare top-level payroll information.
- The Payroll module does not come with in-house training. The realization is that the consultants your organization uses, are also going to be your trainers, leaves many facing challenges of information not being passed to the end-users properly. Workday needs to provide more web-based training, at no extra cost, to users of the system. Payroll is an important module within Workday, and users need to understand the "how's" and "why's" of the system - because it is quite different from other in-house and SaaS payroll systems.
- The Payroll Module is still very young, so there are many developments needed to make it more effective for large organizations. From reports, to tax configurations, to exports and imports of data from 3rd parties, Workday needs to put more focus on listening to its users and making things available more quickly than years down the road. We have had issues with tax calcs and had to identify necessary changes Workday needed to make, which are things other payroll systems have already tackled. In some ways, it can feel like you are redesigning the wheel as you move forward with Workday Payroll.
I came to CMU after they had selected Workday. I think the biggest reason why Workday was selected, was because the business could invest in one system to bring their Payroll, HR, and Benefits activities together, where those had been 3 separate systems in the past.