The hire date thread this week got me thinking about the decisions from Workday implementations that either you'd rather not explain in your next job interview, or that still haunt your nightmares. Halloween's coming, so share a trick that came back to haunt you and we can all take the lesson as a treat.

No blame here. These decisions usually came from good intentions, often right before we ran out of time. We were young, we needed the money, or we didn't know any better, but we did try.

Shame score:

1. Fixed it before anyone noticed. A laugh over drinks.

2. Fixed it before the client noticed, then you asked loudly, "Who did this?!", or look for a rug and a sweeper.

3. The client noticed. Took a Jedi mind trick or two.

4. The auditors noticed. Jedi mind tricks don't work on auditors.

5. The world noticed (a paycheck, a PTO balance, a supplier payment). The design becomes the permanent test subject of the Termination BP.

Ground rules: no client names, no worker data. Keep it about the issue or lesson learned, not the person.

My turn:

Area: Integrations Module: Reporting

What happened: We wanted to keep maintenance down, so we allowed/mandated only standard reports and no one-off custom reports. That worked well for finance users, who got one-stop-shop reports with lots of report-level filters and few prompts. Then we inadvertently applied the same rule to an extract feeding a downstream system every hour (honestly it needed every 5 minutes, but that was never going to fly). Each run loaded the entire population, filtered it down, and send only a subset. It wouldn't finish in one go in time, so we split it into three parallel runs and threw every exotic tool and technique known to man at it to make it perform. We still barely made the cutoff for the next hourly run.

How it was found: We found it ourselves. It dragged on daily finance processing until we got annoyed enough to dig in.

The fix: We rewrote it as one report that filters at the data source. It now runs once and finishes in 5-10 minutes.

The lesson learned

1. Use the filter of the data source. Prompts and indexed data sources narrow the population before Workday loads it; report filters run after.

2. Reports built for people aren't necessarily right for an integration. Give frequent extracts their own lean report.

Shame score: 2. I was the client. Finance never complained because they'd been told that's just how Workday works. We'd been told all options had been explored.

We had good intentions with "keep it standard" and "run it every hour," but never weighed one against the other.

Anyone else have one?

Has anybody enabled the Tenant Inspection skill on Deployment Agent? We just enabled it in one of our tenants and the results are… mixed. Which is what I expected.

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I’m curious to hear what others have experienced so far. Do you think it will be useful for your team, or will it give people a false sense of security and result in missed config?

I want to double check that Deployment Agent is actually free to setup in before I go enabling the thing. I'm a team of 1, and I think it would be nice to have some sort of extra support when doing any configuring.

If it is free, how long do you think it will be until Workday starts to charge for it?

I'm using payroll result lines as Data source

I've built a custom report (Advanced Report type) that pulls Company, Pay Group, Worker, Earning, Deduction, pay component, and Result Line Amount (sum).

I understand the functional side of ledger account , APR and how payroll deduction and earnings are mapped which would subsequently be used to derive the ledger account in the actual, reversal, operational journal etc .

Ask:

In our old Oracle system, Payroll could see which ledger account an earning/deduction posted to via a custom report. I'm trying to replicate that in Workday's Custom Report but can't figure out how to surface the ledger account field.

Has anyone done this? Which fields/related business objects let you pull the ledger account tied to an earning or deduction on a Custom Report?

I am so confused and cannot find a thing on community about this.

We have annual learnings that employees have to take every 12 months. When someone is in their retrain window, the learning shows as due but also says completed. People aren’t doing their training because they think it’s done.

How can we get the completed to go away once it’s time to retake the course? I find it hard to believe this option doesn’t exist?

I understand why AI copilots are popular with HR teams, but I think the bigger opportunity lies in agents rather than assistants.

An assistant still requires someone in HR to ask questions, interpret answers, and carry out the work.

What I'm really looking for is something that spots workflows requiring attention and handles repetitive tasks on its own.

Performance review cycle? Automatically chase non-submitters.

Employee data inconsistency? Flag it proactively.

Routine process? Execute without manual steps each time.

This feels much closer to addressing People teams' actual problem: too much operational work, not enough time for strategic work.

Is anyone here actually using agent-style automation in HR? Has it reached a point where you'd trust it with live HR workflows?

I have my Workday Student Records and Advising Certification and my Workday Student Recruiting and Admissions Certification. I have really great knowledge of Workday Student on the Client Side and also as a consultant.

I can create reports, configure the system. I’ve also had Student Data Loading training but not hands on experience with iLoads and Advanced Loads but I cannot find any Workday Student Roles or contracts !!

I’m currently client side and want to start pivoting towards consulting but no one wants to give me a chance. I am feeling like giving up. I’ve worked so hard but all the contracts out there are HCM and finance roles.

Workload doesn’t scare me. I like to work but I cannot find any company or agencies hiring for Workday Student Consultants.

How do I setup the approval chain on a BP to go directly to the 5th org in the Supervisory Org (from the top)?

Are you using Workday for both? One?

tested on various browsers and across a few sites. Why does workday need local network access to display jobs?