Workday Tutorial

Workday is the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, built on a cloud-based Financial Management and Human Capital Management (HCM) foundation. We use the platform to enhance payroll and HR compliance, reduce risk, automate work with AI agents, and provide the best data for decision-making.

Gartner named Workday a leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM suites for 1,000+ employee enterprises for the 10th consecutive year. Due to its features and benefits, Workday has become the preferred choice for many organizations and offers many job opportunities.

Let’s learn more about Workday in this tutorial.

Table of Contents

• What is Workday
• Workday Terminology
• Workday AI: Sana & Agents
• Workday Architecture
• Benefits of Workday
• Workday Products
• Configure Worklets
• Worklet Menu
• How does the business process work with Workday?
• Workday HCM Introduction
• Professional Services Automation
• Workday Studio
• Installation on Mobile Devices
• Use Cases
• Conclusion
• FAQs

What is Workday?

Workday is a comprehensive package useful for organizations of all sizes. It is helpful for enterprises with multiple locations due to its time-tracking, human resource management, data analysis, and time management features.

Do you want to get certified and build your career in Workday? Then enroll in "Workday Online Training" this course will help you to achieve excellence in this domain.

Workday Terminology

• Business Process: In Workday, a business process comprises tasks that you start, complete, and act upon to accomplish the required business objective. We create the business process by amalgamating approvals, actions, approval chains, Checklists, and To-Dos. The activity can be a sub-processor of a task and can also be a mixture of steps. 
• Life Event: A Benefit event that takes place in our personal life, such as having a child or getting married.
• HeadCount: The number of workers in an organization.
• Org Chart: A visual representation of an organization's structure. It summarises the responsibilities, roles, and relationships between the individuals of the organization.
• Staffing Event: An event that changes our job or position, such as a promotion, hire, or transfer. Generally, staffing events create opportunities to modify benefits elections.
• Worker Profile: The worker profile is the page that provides a quick view of our contact information and position.
• Worklets: Compact reports shown as icons on the landing page that provide access to information and tasks we use regularly. Examples: Open positions, Anniversaries, etc.
• Actions and Views: They are the buttons for generally grouped reports and tasks. We can access it through worklets.
• Add Button: A clickable button that lets us add additional information to the task.
• Alert Message: Alert messages are soft warnings that notify you of system restrictions, as configured. This message allows us to continue working without resolving the issue.
• Attachments Icon: A clickable icon that lets us attach .pdf, .xlsx, and .docx files to a task.
• Arrow: It is a clickable icon that opens the page to further areas that we can edit. It is also related to the More icon.
• Workday Logo: It displays our home page. We can use this icon for navigating back to our home page.
• Calendar: A clickable icon that opens a calendar to select the date.
• Cancel Button: A button that, when pressed, cancels the operation.
• Continue Button: The continue button is a clickable button that advances you to the next step or page in our task process.
• Delete Row: A clickable icon that removes the current row from the grid.

Workday AI: Sana and Agents

Let’s explore the AI features of Workday in this section.

• Workday Illuminate – Announced in September 2024, Illuminate is Workday’s core AI engine, embedded across the entire suite to power automation, generate insights, and surface intelligent recommendations. It is the foundation on which Workday’s agents and the Sana experience are built.
• Agent System of Record – Workday is repositioning from a system of record to a platform of agents, giving organizations a single, governed place to deploy and manage AI agents. These capabilities are reinforced by recent acquisitions – including HiredScore (recruiting AI), Evisort (contract intelligence), Paradox (conversational recruiting), and Sana (enterprise knowledge and learning) – representing roughly $3 billion of AI-focused investment.
• Sana – It is Workday’s superintelligence platform that helps automate processes across HR, Finance, and IT using AI. This is where you can build, orchestrate, and manage agents to automate processes.
• Agentic HR – You can build and employ HR agents that empower people, assist managers, and automate HR operations.
• Agentic Finance – These finance agents help finance professionals predict trends by analyzing financial data. They help them to make the next best course of action.
• Agentic IT – you can develop IT agents that can help you drive transformational outcomes in IT operations. They play a key role in improving trust, agility, and quality.

Let's move ahead and learn about Workday architecture.

Related Article: Workday Certification

Workday Architecture

Even though Workday provides various products, Workday's architecture for understanding the services:

• Persistence Services: It contains an SQL DB for business objects and a NoSQL DB for documents. Whenever we modify the things, OMS will upgrade them in the database.
• Object Management Services: The heart of the architecture. It is a bunch of services that work as an in-memory database. We will implement all the business logic in the OMS for the Workday applications.
• UI Services: It supports different mobile and browser-based clients. We can generate the user interface automatically for iPhone, Mobile HTML, etc.
• Deployment: It supports data immigrations from the heritage systems into Workday. It also offers support to existing customers in getting more Workday products.
• Operations: At Workday, the operations team seamlessly supervises the performance and health of all the services. The team continuously collects health and performance metrics and surfaces them on real-time monitoring dashboards. The operations team uses Kafka to organize and store event logs in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System).

[ Learn Complete About Workday Architecture ]

Benefits of Workday

Workday offers many benefits to its customers. Let’s outline them here:

• You can use it anytime and anywhere with this cloud-based solution.
• It provides 24/7 data access with a secure network.
• It offers an agile system for Finance, HR, and Planning.
• It does not require programming knowledge.
• It enhances process efficiency.
• You can audit every transaction of every object using Workday.
• It has a user-friendly GUI and helps organizations adapt to change.
• It provides access to real-time reports, even on mobile devices.

Workday Products

Workday offers various products suitable for large- and medium-sized enterprise requirements. The following are the different Workday products:

#1. Financial Management

Workday offers financial efficiency and control over functions such as procurement, reporting, projects, and accounting through its cloud ERP software. Without disrupting the business, we can make changes to reporting and processes.

#2. Enterprise Planning

Workday enables planning, execution, and analysis through Workday Adaptive Planning. It essentially improves business performance. It mainly depends on workforce planning, financial planning, and the Elastic Hypercube technology in Workday ERP.

#3. Analytics

The Workday analytics solution transforms data into insights and enables data-driven decision-making. Prism Analytics and People Analytics are key components of Workday Analytics solutions.

#4. Human Capital Management

For HR functions such as recruiting, planning, and workforce visibility, we use the Workday HCM (Human Capital Management) module. It helps us manage the lifecycle of our workers.

Configuring Worklets

We can add additional workouts to our homepage.

On our home page:

1. Press the “settings” icon in the upper-right corner. After clicking the “settings” icon, we can see the Configure Worklets page.

2. Press the “Add Row” icon to add a new worklet.

3. Press the “Prompt Icon” to select the icon from the existing worklets list.

4. Press the “Remove Row” icon to remove the Worklet from the dashboard.

5. Press the “Move Row Up” arrow or “Move Row Down” arrow to record the worklets over the page. To move a Worklet to the first or last position, we use the “Move Row to Button” or “Move Row to Top” arrows.

6. Press “Done” and “OK”.

Worklet Menu

After choosing a Worklet, we can view the page layout that is identical to the following screenshot:

In the page layout, we can see the actions and view sections, which comprise buttons. The buttons in the actions section are linked to the tasks we can perform. Buttons are present in the view section related to the reports we can view.

How does the business process work with Workday?

Workday processes are the heart of the Workday platform. In Workday, the business process involves gathering tasks for human resource management. Business processes can include proposals, compensation, hiring, position creation, termination, etc.  In Workday, we can configure escalations, approval claims, recognitions, etc.

The process flow should be represented and built on paper first before using the system directly. In some situations, using a preferred system workflow is appropriate. We have to gather the requirements before we start developing the business process. 

The following is a set of business process step types that give a clear picture of how it actually works. 

• Initiation: It is the first step in the business process. Generally, initiation refers to starting the process or idea that comes to mind.
• Action: It applies to events that occur in Workday. Propose communication is an example of the Hire business process.
• Approval: This foremost step contains either denial or permission of the business process. The required approver can approve or deny the business process.
• Approval Chain: Generally, an approval chain is a group or series of approvals that moves from the first-level person, then through higher officials and managers.
• Service: Workday provides this service.
• Integration: This step relates to system operation and transfers the necessary data to and from the external application.
• Batch: When we add the batch step, the related business process is not complete until completing the Job process.
• Consolidated Approval: This step enables us to merge multiple approvals for the same individual into a single task with a single task notification.
• Report: This step allows us to execute a report out of action in the business process.
• Checklist: The Checklist relates to the tasks, to-do's, or functions that we must accomplish outside the workday system.
• To Do: This step helps us understand that we have an activity outside the Workday system that an accountable individual must accomplish.

Workday HCM - An Introduction

The HCM (Human Capital Management) module is built on cloud services and designed to support bottom-up tasks. HCM is a global human resources management application. 

The essential functions of human capital management include payroll, human resource management, time and talent management systems, recruitment, and benefits.

Advantages of Human Capital Management:

• HCM enables organizations to understand the skills and costs of the contingent workforce. The HCM self-service system helps us improve leadership and people quality.
• The decision-making feature of HCM allows us to take corrective action against the workforce.
• We can easily configure the system to meet additional requirements.

Workday HCM Modules

#1. Human Resource Management

The Human Resource Management module of Workday HCM provides intuitive, self-service functionality for staffing, payroll, and related tasks. When any modifications occur, such as business roles, reporting priorities, or work assignments, we can instantly modernize the organizational structure in Workday.

Features

• It provides organizational management.
• It offers compensation and absence management.

#2. Talent Management

In this module, attaining our goals depends on the quality of our organization’s team members. The HCM talent management tool helps us enhance the system’s adaptability and development, alignment, management systems, and employee rewards. 

Talent management reduces overall administrative costs and helps new employees quickly integrate into the organization. Workday goal management helps us define, create, and manage essential goals.

Workday's performance management provides accurate performance metrics, real-world workforce insights, and skill development requirements.

Features

• It provides onboarding provisions.
• It has goal management services and succession planning methods.
• It offers a series of panning methods.

#3. Workforce Planning and Analytics

The Workforce Planning and Analytics module in Workday provides a complete, dynamic, and actionable view of talent demand and supply. This module enables the business to make the best decisions. The Workday analytics tool also categorizes positions, roles, capacity, and talent pools.

Features

• It offers operational headcount planning.
• It assists us in demand and supply analytics.
• It contains workforce analytical methods.

#4. Project and Work Management

This module in Workday enables enterprises to focus on the essential, complex components they develop to help their organizations grow better. Project and Work Management includes several elements, such as people, business resources, and the nature of the work.

By combining all these elements, management can make decisions about the team members. We can easily use this tool to find ways to improve efficiency within the organization.

Features

• It offers non-project and project work management systems.
• It helps us reach milestones and provides practical tasks.
• It advises over the project analytical training.

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#5. Recruiting

The Workday recruitment module helps businesses gain visibility into job management in the talent acquisition process. Another essential feature is that the recruiting module also helps manage adaptive workflows and candidate experiences.

The recruiting module in Workday helps organizations maintain control over company recruitment and define their own recruitment rules and restrictions.

Features

• It offers pipeline, headcount, screening, and sourcing analytics.
• It includes Job position and candidate management.
• It also includes an employee referral structure and social media interactions.

#6. Payroll

The Workday payroll module handles the full range of requirements. The application methods enable us to gain full control over pricing, payroll, and data processes. Workday payroll is the best calculation engine for unrestricted pay runs and pay teams. Organizations can receive payroll data as often as needed.

Features

• The Workday payroll does payroll processing for various international companies.
• It provides robust calculation engines and self-service methods.
• It provides tax updates, auditing, and reporting.
• It provides third-party vendor cloud-connect payroll.

#7. Time Tracking

The time-tracking module in Workday integrates seamlessly with project, work, and payroll management to provide a user-friendly experience accessible via the internet and mobile devices. The time-tracking module in Workday allows users to track workers and enter time in any web browser or mobile device.

Features

• It allows users to track global time.
• It has web time and mobile device clocks.
• It has time approval management and global time calculation.

#8. Big Data Analytics

Many enterprises use this module to integrate Workday data with multiple non-Workday data sources. We can include unstructured, massive volumes of data that provide deep workforce understanding to support decision-making, as well as skills-integrated Workday data.

Features

• Non-Workday and Workday data sources may integrate into large volumes of unstructured data.
• It provides single-platform security and user interface applications.
• It offers various built-in HR templates.

Professional Services Automation

Through Workday’s PSA, we can track project feedback, history, and costs to optimize staffing. You can use machine learning to predict attrition. It also provides a contextual chart to accelerate collaboration.

• Cloud Platform: The Workday Cloud Platform portfolio helps us develop new extensions and applications. It offers a single security model to protect data and maintain governance. 
• Student: The Workday Student enables us to manage students, staff, and faculty. We can study student admissions, create and maintain courses, manage fees, and provide financial aid, etc.
• Data-as-a-Service: The Workday benchmarking compares our business performance with our peers. We can refine our approach using peers’ benchmarks by company size, location, and industry. It helps us enhance our business by allocating resources where we need improvement.

Learn Workday Interview Questions and Answers that help you grab high-paying jobs

Workday Studio

Workday Studio is a development tool that enables partners and customers to build integrations with Workday. We deploy and run these integrations on our side via integration servers in Workday's data center.

Workday Studio is the integrated Eclipse-based environment that allows third-party vendors and Workday clients to develop, build, enhance, and troubleshoot their specific solutions running on the Workday cloud.

Note that while Studio is still in use, it is increasingly treated as a legacy integration approach. For new integrations, Workday now steers customers toward Workday Extend, Orchestrate, and the Build developer platform. 

Workday is a cloud-based application that assists with time tracking, human resources, financial, and payroll requirements of the organization. Many organizations are using Workday for its adaptability, focusing on functionality that supports learning and integrating the essence of the functional design process.

When to use Workday Studio:

• If the integration we want to build has any one of the following characteristics, we can use Workday Studio.
• Different data sources and delivery requirements.
• Efficient and scalable processing of large data sets.
• Complicated looping logic according to the external variables or dynamic data.
• Progressive change detection needs.
• Complicated error scenarios and the equivalent requirement for reacting differently to error conditions.

Workday Report Writer

In Workday Report Writer, you can learn how to access report data from Workday data sources and business objects. You can also study how to develop custom reports to meet business requirements across various functional areas. 

Custom reports enable us to analyze real-time data and use it as a data source for outward integrations. It provides an easy-to-use interface. Thus, users can take the necessary actions on the report output from the Report UI.

Workday Integration System

Workday Integration system tools help us to develop and preserve Workday integration systems. Various technologies can integrate with Workday, helping us understand the restrictions and advantages of each and how to use them. It also tells us how to use XML concepts in Workday integration.

Advanced Workday Studio

We can develop, deploy, debug, and support essential integrations using the advanced Workday Studio. We can gain a complete understanding of business objects, web services, reports, and related components in the Studio. The Workday Studio includes tools such as a sequence generator, a debugger, a route component, and integration maps.

Workday Mobile

We require the following information while configuring our Workday mobile application.

• Company ID
• Web Address.

Installing Workday on Mobile Devices

Now, we’ll go through the step-by-step procedure to install Workday on mobile devices.

1. Android

For installing Workday on our Android device

• First, we navigate to “Google Play Store”.
• Press “Search” and type “Workday”.
• Click “Install”.
• Click “Open” to launch the Workday app.
• Click the “Let’s get started” button.
• Finish the installation process.

2. IOS

For installing Workday on our iPhone and IPAD device:

• On our machine, we navigate to the “App Store”.
• Type Workday in the search field and choose “Workday” from the search results.
• Click “Get” and “Install”.
•  Press “Open”, When the app has been downloaded.
• Press “Settings”  and type our tenant name of the company.
• Type your company's Workday web address and press “save”.
• Type your NetID and password.

Workday Use Cases

Let’s now understand the use cases of the Workday platform.

• Technology: Snowflake's chief accounting officer stated, “Now it takes weeks instead of months to onboard new entities and new employees.” The company used Workday’s AI features efficiently to process data spread across multiple locations.
• Healthcare: Medtronic used Workday’s HCM module to streamline the employee lifecycle from hiring to offboarding. The company used the AI capabilities of this HCM module to automate most of the HR processes.
• Risk and Sustainability: Sphera has chosen Workday GO to unify its business data and balance global consistency while navigating specific country regulations. They built a globally consistent, auditable, and scalable HR system for the long run.
• Data Management: Databricks could scale its operations globally by using Workday. To be precise, they expanded their global operations from 20 to 40 companies.
• Trimble: The company leveraged Workday to improve its operational maturity to a new level. For example, they improved payroll compliance in 47 countries. 

Conclusion

Workday is a SaaS software system for human capital management (HCM), finance, project management, and professional services automation. The advanced Workday interface helps organizations implement the latest analytical and reporting capabilities that meet their clients' requirements.

If you want to learn more about Workday, you can join the Workday training by MindMajix. By the end of the training, you will become a skilled Workday professional that organizations actively seek.

Frequenlty Asked Questions

1. Is learning Workday easy?

Yes, you can learn easily. If you brush up on the foundational concepts of HRM and other business processes, you'll learn Workday more quickly.

2. Is Workday a good career path?

Yes, choosing Workday is a good career choice. Workday consultants in India can earn between 9.3 LPA and 10.3 LPA, according to AmbitionBox. They can earn between 69k USD and 179k USD in the USA, according to Indeed.

3. How often does Workday update the software?

Workday releases updates twice every year. For example, Workday released 2025R2 in late 2025 and 2026R1 in early 2026.

4. Which companies hire Workday professionals?

According to AmbitionBox, top companies such as Accenture, Cognizant, TCS, CGI, and Sutherland recruit Workday professionals for good salaries.

5. How to become a Workday consultant?

• Choose the right Workday module based on your technical or educational background to build your career.
• Prepare short- and long-term learning plans.
• You can go through professional training to learn the basics and advanced concepts from industry experts.
• Build a portfolio including your strong, hard, and soft skills.

Explore Workday Sample Resumes! Download & Edit, Get Noticed by Top Employers!

List of Related Workday Certification Courses

Workday HCM Training	Workday Integration Training
Workday Payroll Training	Workday Studio Training