Glossary
Workday Terms
Absence includes time off correction, leave of absence, view your time off, and time off balance.
An application linking you to common actions and views related to benefits, including change benefits, beneficiaries, and dependents. View your benefit elections and current benefits cost.
Workday Benefits is a lot like what you would find in BIONIC > Employee Self Service > Benefits.
A set of related fields, similar to how a table or spreadsheet is composed of a set of related columns. Instances of a business object in Workday are like rows in a table or spreadsheet, with each instance representing a unique occurrence of that type of object, such as an organization or worker. A business object can have no instances, one instance, or many instances. Workday automatically links related business objects together. For example, purchase order lines are linked to a purchase order header; the purchase order header is linked to a supplier; the supplier is linked to a company, and so on.
The set of tasks that need to be completed for an event to occur, the order in which they must be done, and who must do them.
The Dashboard displays pre-configured Worklets that are specific to a functional area, like Talent Management or Workforce Planning. Since Worklets are built with the Report Writer and report-specific calculated fields, they can also be copied and modified. Custom Worklets can be written and added to these dashboards using the Report Writer.
Some business processes, or steps within those processes, can be delegated from one worker to another on a temporary basis. This is particularly useful for managing work during vacations and leaves of absence.
A transaction that occurs within your organization, such as hiring or terminating a worker.
An application linking you to common actions and views related to expenses, including creating and editing expense reports and viewing recent expenses.
A clickable icon used to narrow down data. Filtering a report allows you to display from one or more columns.
Grouping of tasks, reports, and objects. For example, the HCM (Human Resources) solution includes functional areas such as Benefits, Talent & Performance, Absence, and Manager or Employee self-service. Each of the Workday solutions (like Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management) is grouped into distinct functional areas.
Tracks spending for physical objects, which can be expensed, capitalized, or issued to a worker. This includes office supplies, computer hardware and software, etc. Purchase orders for goods will display information related to a purchase item, including item description and unit price.
Your default page containing applications, search, notifications, inbox, profile, and main menu.
Workday Home is a lot like what you would find in BIONIC > Employee Self Service.
Displays a count for your action items and takes you to your Inbox.
Displays a count for your new notifications and takes you to your Notifications page.
A visual depiction of how an organization is structured. It outlines the roles, responsibilities, and relationships between individuals within an organization.
An application linking you to common actions and views related to your pay. You can use this application to access payment and withholding elections, view your paycheck, and see your total compensation and payment history. This is also where you'll find tax documents like your W2.
Workday Pay is a lot like what you would find in BIONIC > Employee Self Service > Payroll and Compensation.
Procurement is the act of gaining goods or services from an external source. Procure-to-pay functionality within Workday includes:
- Spending on goods, services, contingent workers, and project-based services
- Managing supplier contracts, requisitions, purchase and change orders, receipts, goods and services sourcing, and requests for quotes
- Maintaining a supplier portal of catalogs, items, and supplier links
- Creating accruals for approved, un-invoiced receipts
Most of these Procurement activities used to happen in a combination of E-Market for purchasing and invoices, GRAM for College Credit Card allocations, and Reimbursements (paper forms) for out-of-pocket expenses.
A group of people with specific responsibilities and permissions. When a business process runs, the role for each step includes all of the workers in that role.
A security group is a collection of users or a collection of objects that are related to users. A security policy grants users users access to information and/or the ability to perform tasks in Workday.
An application linking you to common actions and views related to your time, including entering your time and viewing your time off balance.
Prior to Workday, Time Entry was a paper-based process and hourly staff would view their Time Off balance in BIONIC.
This is your continuously updated profile page. It provides a quick view of your experience, skills, education, and projects.
A Worktag is a named attribute you can assign to events and objects to indicate their business purpose.
Business Purpose is a little like Account in legacy systems like Financial Edge, E-Market, and GRAM, so an example of an Expenses Worktag would be Travel.

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