1. What is Workday?
Workday is a cloud-based software provider that specializes in financial management and human capital
management solutions. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, two former executives at PeopleSoft, founded it
in 2005. It’s a pioneer in SaaS business apps and is renowned for its ease of usage and rapid setup when
compared to HCM and other finance systems.
2. What are the modules in the Workday?
Following are the Workday modules:
Workday for Finance and Supply Chain
Workday for HR and Payroll
Workday's Foundation Data Model
Workday Reporting.
3. List out the main Workday features.
The main features of Workday are:
Performance management
Time tracking
Recruiting and Onboarding
Human Resource Management
Audit and Internal controls
Payroll solutions
Goal management
Career and development planning
Accounting and Finance
Big Data Analytics Integration
Talent Management
Centralized Business Management
Cloud Connect for Third-party payroll.
4. What are the advantages of Workday?
Workday benefits include:
Increased productivity - Using separate and disconnected systems for essential processes results in an
operational slowdown. Most the medium-sized businesses reported that productivity has increased
when moved to Workday (a single system).
Better insight into company data - Surveys state that a single system gives greater visibility into relevant
data and better reporting. With Workday, you can turn data into insight and insight into action.
Build a happy, motivated workforce - Improves employee engagement that helps them to grow at every
stage of their career.
Improved operational efficiency - Most businesses reported that operational efficiency improved when
moved from multiple to a single system. Workday delivers company commitments more quickly and
cost-effectively than before.
Manage Compliance and risk - Workday provides tools to amplify audit and Compliance and meet new
regulations with ease.
Reduced costs - Bringing together several essential functions can reduce the technology costs,
maintenance, and staff time.
5. What companies use Workday?
Companies using Workday:
Walmart
Netflix
Adobe
Salesforce
VISA
Siemens
Santander
Prudential
COMCAST
Puma
Ryan.
6. Why is Workday so popular?
Business change is happening faster than ever. To meet the unique needs of today's labor market and
make an impact, you need a flexible HR system to help you handle whatever comes next.
Workday provides a cloud-native system with finance, HR, planning, and analysis. It allows you to
surface insights, respond to changes, and enable you to work more efficiently than ever. With one HR
system from Workday, you can bring actual value to your business.
Also, many world's top leading companies like Netflix, Adobe, etc., trust Workday to carry out their HR
and finance-related functionalities.
7. Is Workday free?
No, Workday does not offer any free plan. To know more about Workday Pricing, contact the sales team
to get a quote specifically tailored to your business requirements.
8. What database does Workday run on?
Workday uses a relational database to store all metadata and application data. To improve application
performance, it keeps all application metadata and most application data in memory.
9. How do I get access to the Workday?
The Workday can be accessed through the Workday App, OKTA App, or the website. First, you need to
create an account and use that credentials to access Workday in an organization. As per the access
rights given to the particular individual, you'll get the accessibility of specific tasks and reports.
10. Define Workday Worklets?
The icons which are displayed on the home page and are used to provide quick access to frequently
referenced data and tasks are defined as Workday Worklets.
11. What kind of application is Workday?
Workday is a cloud-based software vendor specializing in enterprise resource management, human
capital management, and financial management applications.
12. Will Workday work on any computer with any internet browser?
Yes, Workday is supported by almost all internet browsers, including Google Chrome, Internet Chrome,
Firefox, and Safari.
13. What is the Workday next release called, and when will it go live?
Workday's fall update, known as 2021 R1, will go live on March 13, 2021. It brings many enhancements
to Time and Absence, Recruiting, Payslips, and general updates to the interface to improve accessibility
and usability.
14. How many Workday updates are released per year?
Twice a year, Workday issues major updates to its software.
15. What does a tenant mean in Workday?
A tenant is an application that requires its own secure computing environment. Every workday customer
has their secure tenant, which only they can access.
Workday tenant is a unique instance of the software with a separate set of data held by Workday in a
logically separated database.
Multi-tenancy is a crucial feature of Workday that allows you to experience the complete spectrum of
Workday functionality through one application server.
16. Name a few post-production and pre-production Workday Tenants.
Post-Production Workday Tenants
Sandbox Tenants
Production Tenants.
Pre-Production Workday Tenants
Implementation Tenant
Gold Tenant.
17. What kind of reports will Workday provide?
HCM, financials, and Payroll in Workday will have standard and custom reports as per the business
needs. Few reports combine information from both the Payroll/HCM and Financial modules. Features of
these reports include custom prompts, calculated fields, graphics, charts, and interactivity. Data in the
reports can be made available to other applications.
[ Check out: Workday Architecture ]
18. Is Workday an ERP system?
Ans. Yes, Workday is a true Enterprise Resource Planning system. It's a unified SaaS software system for
finance, planning, human capital management, project management, and business intelligence.
Workday ERP is used for business processes and data transformation enterprise-wide.
19. List down the Workday HCM modules.
The following are the modules of Workday HCM -
Talent management
Time tracking
Human Resource Management
Recruiting and Onboarding
Workforce planning and analytics
Payroll
Time and Absence management
Audit and Internal Controls.
20. What are Workday Integrations?
Workday presents a single architecture, cloud-based enterprise applications, and management suites
that blend HR, finance, and analytics into a single system. Through this, users can manage and customize
data sets to any workforce source easily.
Workday integrations are used for balancing high-security standards, powerful insights, agile updates,
and intuitive UI across devices so that anyone can customize dashboards to get actionable insights.
The major types of Workday Integrations are:
Enterprise Information Builder (EIB)
Workday Studio
Cloud Connect.
21. Name some security group types supported by Workday?
Workday security groups fall into the following categories:
User-based
Role-based
Intersection
Aggregation
Segment-based.
22. What is Workday Raas?
RaaS stands for Reporting as a Service. Workday RaaS is a feature that allows exporting data by creating
a custom report within Workday and then exposes it as a web service. The output can be of many
formats such as XML, RSS, or JSON and can be modified within the URI.
23. What do you understand about the term 'Business Process' in Workday?
In Workday, the business process is a collection of tasks that you can initiate, act upon, and finish to
accomplish the desired business objective as part of an HR procedure. Business processes define
Workday's core functionality. It describes how significant events flow and allows the configuration of
approvals, notifications, conditions, etc.
Examples of business processes are changing jobs, Hiring, Terminating Employees, Proposing
Compensation Change, and more.
24. Define Workday Business Process Framework.
The Workday Business Process (WBP) Framework enables you to improve process flows within a
company by inducing various activities. It allows customers to configure and manage core flows within
the Workday to connect people, apps, and services. In the Workday applications, the business process
framework is where all the transaction-related changes to data and events originate.
25. What type of conditions define Business Process Steps in Workday?
In Workday, StartProxy is the task that gives all the details of the business processes involved in the
Organization. Business process steps involve validation condition, running condition, entry condition,
and exit condition.
26. Tell me, will business process events be impacted if you modify the business process definition in
Workday?
In Workday, to edit the business process definition, you need to search the business process name -
>edit the definition of the related action. By creating a new business process definition, the already
running business process won't get affected. It keeps running in the background without causing the
event to overlap.
27. Which task helps you to test assigned steps in the business process in the organization?
'Start Proxy' is the task used to test the assigned steps in the business process. Proxy policies are
configured from the "Create Proxy Access Policy" task, and they cannot be executed in production
environments.
28. Which type of approvals can you configure in a review step in a Business Process?
Individual Approval
Consolidated Approval Chain
Consolidated Approval
Mass Approval
Approval Chain.
29. What report provides the details of all the actions available for the specific Business Process Type?
Business Process Configurations Options report.
Advanced Workday Interview Questions and Answers
30. How can Organizations be tied to Business Processes?
Workday allows the configuration of Business Processes per Organization. While implementing a
business process with multiple Organization-dependent definitions, Workday follows a hierarchy to
check which definition to execute. An example could be multiple hire business process definitions
depending on departments.
E.g., Hire for Finance department, Hire for the HR department, Hire for the IT department, etc.
31. What is a Business Process Completion Step?
The business process is considered complete once the completion step finishes the execution. All the
actions depend on business process completion but do not depend on all the steps being executed.
For example, an organization wants to hire a candidate, and that position requires background
verification. Suppose if you do not want to wait for all the information to come back from the
background check business process, you can set the completion step before the last step. That will allow
the pre-hire or hire business processes and enter the Background Check Business Process before the
Pre-Hire executes all the steps.
If no steps are marked as a completion step, then the last step will be the completion step by default.
32. What actions can you do with a Business Process Event if you want to modify its behavior in a
running state?
You can use actions like cancel, reassign, correct, and delegate to modify the business process event's
behavior pattern. To search for events, you can use the prefix "event"
33. What are the types of reports generated by Workday?
Workday offers three primary types of reports:
Basic - At this level of reporting, you'll be able to summarise information related to pay, Time Off, and
more.
Advanced - This reporting type allows you to manage complex multi-data object reporting and enables
multi-level sorting and complex record selection (filtering).
Composite - This reporting type supports more complex calculations and is used more on the finance
side of Workday.
34. Name the prefix used to limit the search for business processes.
"bp:" is used for limiting the search to business processes.
35. Does IDS (Institutional Data Store) store every piece of existing data from the mainframe and
Workday?
No, IDS is not a backup system. The mainframe's data that is no longer needed is achieved separately.
Data in Workday will be backed up on the Workday server. The IDS will store only a subset of Workday
data if the data is recognized as critical data and necessary for a significant downstream report or data
feed that Workday cannot handle.
36. What is the relation between Business objects and Data sources in Workday?
Workday stores your data as business objects. A business object can be defined as a template of an
entity, whereas a data source is the data selection or group of data that creates the template.
Data sources are defined and delivered by Workday. Workday delivers various data sources for primary
business objects. A data source can be designed to return all instances of the primary business object, or
it can have built-in filtering logic defined by Workday
37. Describe workday payroll.
Workday Payroll is a part of the Workday HCM Suite that includes human capital management and
advanced payroll capabilities. It streamlines the entire payroll process from initial hiring to complete
payroll processing and tax compliance.
Here are the essential features of Workday Payroll which make it a great fit for enterprises and global
businesses are -
Pay groups - It allows you to create specific groups for specific employee types, rather than paying
hourly, salaried, and executive-level payroll the same way across the board.
Automatic tax updates - This feature allows you to have the latest tax information for reporting
purposes.
Multiple tax filling options - This feature allows you to outsource taxable tasks and wages.
Fully customizable - Workday Payroll is fully customizable to create the interface you want to make the
options applicable to your role within the business.
Automatic payroll audits - It helps to reduce common payroll errors.
38. Is Workday Payroll available as a stand-alone payroll service provider?
No, Workday Payroll is a part of Workday HCM that provides complete employee management,
including hiring, termination, payroll processing, and more.
39. Will Workday handle my payroll taxes?
You can choose either an integrated service to manage payroll reporting and tax remittance or handle
the entire tax process in-house, common in enterprise-level organizations for better control of the
processes.
40. Explain Workday Financial Management.
Workday Financial Management is a cloud solution designed to provide complete business insight into
your organization. It captures all transactions and supports core foundational processes in real-time.
Workday Financial Management is built on the adaptive, global foundation that delivers organizations
with core management capabilities. The core areas used to achieve great insight are Accounting and
Finance, Revenue Management, Financial Reporting and Consolidation, Inventory, Procurement, Project
Billing, Audit and Internal Controls, and more.
41. Explain Workday Human Capital Management
Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) is a cloud-based solution that assists global businesses of
all sizes in various industry verticals with workforce planning and execution. Any changes that occur with
business circumstances and requirements, including worker assignments, reporting, business process
rules, etc., are immediately updated in the Workday HCM.
Workday Human Capital Management includes Human resource management, talent management,
workforce planning, recruiting, payroll, time, project management, and more.
42. What is Workday Studio?
Workday Studio is an Integrated Eclipse-based environment that allows Workday customers and 3rd
parties to create, deploy, debug, and support complex integrations running in the Workday Cloud. It is
used to make modern combinations that utilize various reports and Workday Web Service (WWS).
43. What are the types of reporting in Workday?
Workday reports can be categorized into two ways, one is standard, and another one is custom.
Standard reports are developed and managed by Workday. Custom reports address the needs of the
businesses.
44. What are the ways to create a report in Workday?
You can create a report in two ways in Workday:
Run the Create Custom Report task.
Copy a Workday Standard Report and modify it
45. If a particular report is shared within the organization, will anyone be able to see the same output
while running the report with the same input values?
No, the output will depend on the security access to the data source of the individual who is running the
report.
46. What are Calculated Fields?
A calculated field is used for data manipulation. It is used in reporting, integrations, business processes,
scheduling recurring processes, and other areas within Workday.
You should run the Create Calculated Field task to create calculated fields. Some of the essential things
you can perform with Calculated Fields are currency conversion, lookup-related values, string or text
manipulation, evaluation of an expression, format a date, etc.
47. How Workday reporting is different from other SQL ERP systems?
Workday follows an object-oriented relationship model. While creating a report in Workday, you can
select a primary business object and a data source.
48. Name a few ways of how to access a Workday Standard Delivered Report?
The following are the ways to access Workday Standard Delivered Report:
Browsing by Category in the Sitemap
Writing the name of a specific report in the search bar.
Running Workday Standard Reports
49. What are the two types of security policies in Workday?
Business Process policies and Domain policies
50. What is the use of Domain Security Policies?
With domain security policies, you can modify which group can view or modify items in a report/task, or
GET or PUT transactions from an integration.
51. How do you manage access to integrations?
You need to create an Integration System User and an Integration Security Group. Next, assign the
Integration User to the Integration security group. Then finally, utilize that security group to add security
policy access.
52. What prefix do you use to search for integrations?
"Intsys:" is the prefix used for searching the integrations.
53. List out some Integration ID types.
Workday ID
External ID
Reference ID
54. Why do you use XSLT in an integration?
XSLT is used for modifying input/output data going into an XML document.
55. What is a WSDL?
Web Service Description Language is used to define how XML documents should be formatted to be
accepted as input or determine the output of Workday Web Services.
56. Name the prefix that limits a search to reports?
"rd:" is used for limiting the search to reports.
57. Name some MVEL variables that you can use in Workday Studio?
"lp" to access launch parameters.
"vars" to access MessageContextVariables
"props" to access message properties
58. How do you apply changes to security policies?
You need to run the Activate Pending Security Policy Changes to apply the security policy changes.
59. To modify security in Workday, what groups do you need to be a part of?
Security Configurator or Security Administrator.
60. Which Workday Studio component is used to translate a conditional if or a loop?
Route component is used to translate both conditional if or a loop depending on the routing strategy.
