Invisors' Workday New Years Resolutions For 2025

This year at Invisors, we’re striving to do the same with our Workday tenant – we’re setting New Years Resolutions that, while not a lot of work, will make our Internal Workday Environment even more usable, easier to maintain and a better fit for our organization.  

# 1 |   Keep things simple 

• Don’t underestimate the power of a payroll input – We have ad hoc payroll inputs that take less than 10 minutes a month. Maintaining the configuration would probably take just as long and be more prone to issues as situations change. 
• Don’t prioritize best practice over the best fit for your organization if that “best practice” is going to make your life harder – For Invisors, this came in the form of an amount-based merit plan. While not something I’d ever seen a client actually use, it was the right fit for a small population at Invisors and easier to maintain than other more traditional options. In this same way, don’t be afraid to think in ways that would be outside-the-box for someone else, but end up being the best practice for your organization. 
• Don’t reinvent the reporting wheel – We love a “Kitchen Sink” worker data report that has all the main fields you’d typically need. Then, when you need something new, you can just add it to that same Kitchen Sink report rather than creating a new report for every new combination of data. 

# 2 |      Plan ahead

With an incredibly experienced team supporting our Invisors Workday tenant, it’s easy to just handle things on the fly. However, the configuration is only a small part of maintaining a system and the other pieces often require more lead time. There are external vendors, internal resource PTO, and change management that can unexpectedly extend a timeline if we don’t take the extra steps. The main themes of this resolution are to plan a few extra weeks into each timeline and to build out a Business-as-Usual calendar at the start of each year so we are never caught off guard.

• Always assume vendor testing will take longer than you expect – This is true even if you have a timeline from the vendor saying otherwise. You will never regret adding a few weeks to the timeline.  
  
• Plan for Banking Adjustments – Post go-live additional integrations with new banks will usually take longer than expected. Delays can lead to manual processes and frustration for all. For example, when establishing a new Banking relationship in a new region or county, it is absolutely critical that you start that process early. 
• Plan for the high and low periods of the year – Utilize your Business-as-Usual calendar to determine which periods are going to be particularly busy for your resources. Consider enlisting extra support during this time, either from an experienced Workday Support partner like Invisors or by finding resources internally who could be re-allocated to the work. Ensure you’re considering the skills of your workers as well, in case you need time to bring in extra expertise.  
• Plan for audit/year-end close each year – Make sure any new audit requirements, reporting and process controls have been reviewed prior to the year end. Audits can go slower year-over-year if report development is ongoing during audit. 
  - Leverage Invisors Year-End System Maintenance Guide – Year-end is filled with activities that happen so infrequently, it can be easy to forget something. By utilizing a year-end guide, you can avoid any unnecessary issues. Invisors publishes one each year and we leverage this list internally to ensure we have all our bases covered - and as a Bonus ✨ we include a Workday annual calendar filled with important dates to keep you running smoothly all-year-long.
  
  

# 3 |    Document everything, ideally in a shared document

There is nothing quite as satisfying as looking back at detailed notes and realizing you’ve documented exactly how to fix an issue you’ve seen before. The satisfaction alone serves as a reminder to consistently take solid ad hoc notes. While it’s easy to believe you’ll will remember something, you may not, or you may not be the person who owns that workstream in the future. At Invisors we try to save time and effort by taking quick notes about everything, especially around uncommon cyclical processes and storing them in a consistent, shared, location. 

• Develop a list of people who have unique scenarios – Any time you are implementing a change or launching a process such as an annual merit process, you can refer back to this list and test using those people. For example you may have only a handful of non-exempt workers, some people on amount based bonus plans, a casual worker, Partners and a team abroad: all groups that you’ll want to double-check with every major change to the system. Depending on the change, you’ll always have other scenarios to check, but it’s nice to have a go-to list of your exceptions. 
• Build out a working list of lessons learned from each cyclical process (OE, Performance, Comp) – Spend 15 minutes writing down anything that went wrong or unexpectedly and review before the next cycle. In a perfect world, you might complete a full post-mortem after each of these cycles, but especially if you don’t have an ongoing support partner, this may not be attainable for your capacity. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and instead just jot down some quick notes while they are fresh in your mind.  
• Take your Business-as-Usual calendar from the previous resolution and toss key dates into your calendar at the start of the year – This usually only takes 5 to 10 minutes but can save you major issues later, if you find that you’ve booked a trip over a key date or accidentally have busy year-end activities coinciding with other key milestones at your job. 

# 4 |    Remember the fundamentals

Once you’ve been live for a while, it can be easy to feel very confident with your environment and therefore let some of the foundational items that were a focus during the deployment slip. Returning to the fundamentals often saves time in the end and can avoid crises or lingering issues.

• Testing is important, but testing Integrations is critical – Even Connectors need to be tested to ensure there are no gaps or issues.
• Audit journals monthly – There can be constant mistakes that are fixed via manual journals. This is painstaking and often requires a separate configuration fix. 
• Along with your standard Payroll Processing audits, conduct deeper audits – These can include reviewing YTD values against IRS limits and confirming control totals on all inbound + outbound integrations periodically to check for any new issues from data and configuration changes. 

While all of these resolutions are very easy to say, they also benefit from being surprisingly easy to do. Like all of my favorite New Years Resolutions, they are tiny tweaks that make for a big impact.  

Honorable mentions:

These tips don’t fall within the criteria of small, easy tweaks to make. They often require some more thorough planning and resource allocation, but they can make the benefits from your resolutions even more stark and easier to achieve. 

• Create a control review process around reporting, both for requirement review and on the back end, to audit which custom reports are being used. This helps keep your tenant clean and avoids the clutter of multiple reports doing the same thing. 
• Develop a reporting SWAT team. No matter how good a job you’ve done throughout your implementation and since going live, you will always have more reporting requests. It’s important to build a group of experienced and knowledgeable resources to avoid having reports with bad data or no reports at all. 
• Build out robust Audit Dashboards. Running periodic audits is incredibly valuable, and, as long as you’ve followed the other resolutions, doesn’t have to be a large time commitment. However, this can be optimized by having all of the important audits right at users’ fingertips in a dashboard. This removes any tribal knowledge requirement about what audits to run and allows you to quickly run many at once and scan for issues.  
• Review your notifications and deactivate any notification that isn’t absolutely necessary. Notifications and alerts can be incredibly powerful tools, but if users are inundated with them, they  are frequently completely ignored. A notification assessment and cleanup project can return their usefulness and reduce email overload. 

By taking on even just some of these resolutions, you’ll be setting your organization up for a successful year on Workday, smoother daily operations and a system that works for you, rather than you working for it.  

Need a little extra guidance or a personalized review of where your organization could use a “new-year, new-system”? Connect with one of our experts on the benefits of a Tenant Assessment. 

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