Workday® 2025 R2 is here!
We’re proud to present our top highlights for the Workday 2025 R2 release!
Have questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out. The Commit team is available to answer your R2 questions.
Want to keep up with the latest Workday news?
Subscribe to our newsletter!
Financials
Bank Routing Codes for Supplier Invoices and Miscellaneous Payment Requests
Enables you to select the bank account for payments directly at transaction entry.
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: The new prompt on Supplier Invoices and Requests will reduce the need for workarounds to correct the bank account after you create payments.
Header
Intercompany Multicurrency Netting
Enables you to pay direct intercompany invoices in multiple currencies
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This increases business efficiency by streamlining direct intercompany payments and reducing foreign exchange exposure.
Header
Multicurrency Support for Company Bank Accounts
Enables you to set up multicurrency accounts by creating multiple bank accounts
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Helps reduce costs associated with multicurrency transactions by minimizing FX fees. This will also streamline operations by enabling multicurrency payments without conversions and lowering administration burden of having multiple foreign banks accounts.
HCM
HCM Admin Hub
Consolidated HCM Setup and Configuration
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Provides centralized access to essential tasks and reports and promotes discovery of new tools
The new HCM Admin Hub allows easy access to setup and configuration tasks for:
To Opt-In:
To Opt-Out:
Job Architecture Hub
A Centralized Space for Job Architecture Data and Tasks
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This provides you a centralized and customizable place to manage your job architecture data.
Benefits and Functionality
Multiple Sections
New Report Fields
New Report
Multiple Jobs for Contingent Workers
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: The ability to enable multiple jobs on Contingent Workers will make it easier to manage, schedule and track time across positions, resulting in less administrative effort and greater workforce agility.
Business Process Updates
Tenant Setup
Additional Considerations
Adaptive
In-Application Chat Capabilities
Chat capabilities provide greater team alignment within Adaptive Reporting and Dashboards
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: This feature eliminates the need for multiple external communication methods such as emails, separate chat applications, or spreadsheets by enabling direct, in-context discussions within Adaptive Planning.
Workday Assistant For Adaptive
The Workday Assistant for Adaptive Planning (Assistant) provides in-system support capabilities to enhance the end user experience
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This feature enables more strategic decisions, boosts productivity, and streamlines the end-user access to Adaptive Planning data and insights..
Cell Explorer Multicoordinate Support
Drill-Down Capabilities are now enabled on Reports and Dashboards for multi-selected coordinates
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: This feature update decreases the manual effort spent troubleshooting intersections of data. Users can perform more advanced analysis of the underlying data driving financial statements.
Absence
New Absence Calendar Experience
Workday will retire legacy Time Off and Absence calendars, fully transitioning to the new Absence Calendar Experience
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Ensures organizations are prepared for the mandatory shift to the New Absence Calendar Experience, providing a more modern, efficient, and transparent absence management process.
Retirement of Existing Tasks
New Experience and Tasks
Other notes
Multiple Time Off Entries for the Same Date as One Request
Enhances Absence Calendar Experience by allowing multiple time off types or edits within a single request
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Provides workers with greater flexibility and efficiency in managing absences, reducing navigation steps and simplifying complex requests.
More Flexible Time Off Requests
Improved Day-Level Editing
Custom Additional Fields for Leave Types
Create and manage custom fields on leave types to support global and regulatory use cases
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Provides flexibility to capture key absence details directly in Workday, improving payroll processing, compliance reporting, and reducing manual tracking.
New Framework for Additional Fields
Expanded Reporting and Rules Support
Benefits
AI Help Articles for Healthcare Plans
Generate Help Articles for Healthcare Plans with AI
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This release streamlines benefits communication by using AI to auto-generate healthcare plan Help articles, reducing admin workload while giving employees quick, clear access to benefits information.
Business Benefits
Security
UI Changes
Reporting
What’s Coming Next
New Enrollment Event Coverage Begin Date Option
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: New rule logic allows for benefit coverage start dates to align with payroll deduction start dates, improving consistency between benefits and payroll.
Business Benefits
Changes
Impact
Compensation
Templates for Request Compensation Change
Continued enhancements first delivered with Workday 2024R1
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This update can help streamline compensation changes, making it easier for users to enter compensation changes. This update can also hide certain fields to help prevent users from updated incorrect compensation.
You can now configure a compensation change template for the Request Compensation Change process
Rule-Based Security Groups for Compensation Review
You can now limit users from viewing themselves within compensation review planning tasks and reports
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This update allows us to prevent individuals with heightened security, such as Compensation Administrators or HR members, from seeing or editing their own awards in the grid or related compensation review planning tasks.
Workday delivers a new “Process: Compensation Review Rule Based Access” domain
New rule-based security access to compensation review planning
Limit ability view self in reports using the Adjustment For business object
Compensation Review Manager Experience
Included with the new planner experience enhancements, these updates aim to make planning easier and more intuitive
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: These updates will make the Planner Experience more intuitive and make the planning tasks look a little neater and more organized. This future will no longer be opt-in with the 2025 R2 updates.
In the first level Planner’s view, Workday adds a few new display options
Organization Summary Manager Experience
Included with the new planner experience enhancements, these updates aim to make planning easier and more intuitive
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: These updates will make the Planner Experience more intuitive and make the planning tasks look a little neater and more organized. This future will no longer be opt-in with the 2025 R2 updates.
In the Organization Summary view, Workday adds new display options
Payroll – Core
Shared Recoup Arrears Limit
Enables additional recoup limits across deductions
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Increased ease of compliance and auditing.
Prevents excessive recoupment from employee pay
New Tasks
Supports compliance mandates such as outlined in the Oregon Family Leave Act
Payroll Input Custom Validations
Custom validations can be used to prevent invalid inputs
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Improves data quality and avoids payroll errors
Header
Retirements
Ensure replacements are in place!
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Keep full functionality in consideration of retirements.
Pay Worklet
XSLT for Payslips
Payroll Result Lines Report Fields
Payroll – U.S.
Effective Dating of Tax Authority Exceptions from Pay Component Groups
Define the date when the pay calculations begins to include/exclude a pay component
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Provides better flexibility in managing tax authority and withholding order exceptions.
Auto Adjust Taxable Wages Over the Wage Limit
Applies to payment dates on or after 1/1/25
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Reduces the need to make manual adjustments to adjust overstated taxable wages.
Schedule FLSA Work Period Calendar Update
FLSA work period calendars can be maintained automatically.
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Avoids payroll issues created when the work period calendar is not updated in a timely manner.
Schedule FLSA Work Period Calendar Update
Payroll – Canada
Effective Dating of Tax Authority Exceptions from Pay Component Groups
Define the date when the pay calculations begins to include/exclude a pay component
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Provides better flexibility in managing tax authority and withholding order exceptions.
Effective date for an exception for taxes or withholding orders
Effective date for Flat Sum Bonus
Allows for better control of both current and retro calculations
Retro for Statutory Holiday Earnings
New Retro Capability
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Statutory Holiday earnings can calculate in retro, removing the need to perform manual adjustments
Statutory Holiday Earning Update
Configuration Changes
Security Domain Update
Description of Update
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Enables your payroll team to access reports secured to the tax filing domain
Updated Security Domain
Configuration Changes
Cross Application & Security
Self Service Journeys User Experience
Enable Existing or New Journeys for Self-Service Discovery
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Users can now search for Journeys relevant to their current professional endeavors.
Security Admin Hub
Consolidated Security Admin Tasks and Reports
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: One location to visualize and maintain all aspects of tenant security with direct access to essential tools
Extend Cards on Workday Home
Configure Extend Cards on the Home Page
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Provides quick access to relevant data and tasks from your Extend applications directly in a consistent location.
Administrators can add extend cards after a developer deploys an Extend app containing extend cards. Extend Cards can:
Extend Cards can also be added to Journeys, Hubs, and Search.
Challenge Questions
Changes are coming to account authentication
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Challenge Questions will be retired, and you’ll want to start using more secure methods – multi-factor or passwordless authentication.
Challenge questions will be retired as a primary authentication factor
These tasks and report will be retired:
These fields will be retired:
Scheduling
Scheduling Worklets
The tasks to schedule workers and view schedules is trimmed down to two
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Consolidates the fundamental tasks of Scheduling so employees and managers can navigate to schedules more quickly.
The primary Scheduling worklets for employees and managers to access are:
Retiring the following worklets:
Scheduling Data on the Edit and Approve Time Report
View scheduled hours alongside hours worked
Availability: Automatically Available
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Streamlines visibility management and ensures more accurate time reporting.
Control default visibility of scheduling data
Edit and Approve Time Report
Talent & Performance
Generate Feedback Suggestions
Use AI suggested improvements to feedback responses
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Writing feedback is often challenging and time-consuming, leading to many unanswered requests and responses that are too vague to be useful. This new features makes it easier for employees to provide high-quality feedback that drives meaningful conversations and improves performance.
Header
Guided and Summary Editors
Retirement of expired editor abilities in Workday
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: This ensures that all employee reviews are using the same Guided Experience for reviews to give a consistent and modern feel throughout the review experience.
Goals User Interface
Retirement of current interface for updated look & experience
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: The new user interface for Goals will be consistent with the recent changes to other areas in Talent and Performance and improves user experience of those utilizing goals.
Workday plans to retire the user interface for Goals for those not opted into the Goals User Experience Redesign feature
To continue to use Goals, initiators must be temporarily removed for Individual Goal creation & then you must Opt-In for the updated experience
New interface will have the card format that other Talent & Performance functionalities have turned to
Reporting
Trended Workers Data Source
Improved Functionality
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Gives organizations a longer historical view of workforce metrics, strengthening forecasting and strategic decision-making
Extended Trended Worker reporting from 36 months to 72 months, enabling deeper workforce trended analysis.
Waterfall Chart in Report Writer
New Functionality
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: Makes it easier to visualize and understand how positive and negative factors contribute to an outcome. Facilitating better understanding of financial statements, inventory changes or project progress.
Report Writer now supports Waterfall charts, providing clearer insights into sequential value changes.
Dynamic Display By Option for Composite Reporting
Improved Functionality
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Streamlines reporting, saves time, and makes composite reports more adaptable to changing business structures
Enhances Composite Reporting with dynamic display field, allowing repeating columns to adjust automatically based on report prompts
Recruiting
Constrained Prospect Security
Enables users to constrain prospect access by country
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Allows users to only see prospect data for their assigned regions and ensures the organization stays GDPR compliant
Create Recruiting Regions:
Security Configuration:
Reporting:
Candidate Availability for High Volume Recruiting
Collect Candidate Availability from external job application
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Provides better onboarding experience, reduces manual and external communications, help increase engagement from time of offer to onboarding
Configure candidate availability templates
My Availability page is newly delivered
Candidate Work Availability section on Candidate Profile is newly delivered
Additional Info
My Conversations
Newly delivered location for user’s conversational notification
Availability: Automatically Available
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Separates conversations from notifications, providing a way for recruiters to focus on conversations with candidates
New My Conversations icon
Notifications
Time Tracking
Flexible Check-in and Check-Out
Configure thresholds that let workers adjust check-in and check-out times within a set window
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Improves accuracy and compliance by ensuring worked time is recorded correctly while reducing manual adjustments for managers.
New Options for Clock Event Edits
Improved Worker Time Entry Flexibility
Expanded Reporting and Audit Fields
Restrictions and Compatibility Notes
Calculated Time Offs Crossing Midnight
Calculated time offs now align with calculated time blocks, enabling consistent use in time calculations.
Availability: Automatically Available
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Aligns time off handling with time blocks, ensuring absences are accurately reflected in time calculations, shift premiums, and compliance rules.
New Calculated Time Off Capability
Considerations and Future Enhancements
Time Management Hub
A centralized hub where workers can access all Absence, Time Tracking, and Scheduling tasks
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Centralizes time-related activities into one streamlined hub, improving efficiency for workers and reducing reliance on multiple worklets across mobile and desktop.
Consolidated Access Point for Workers
Overview Page for Tasks and Reports
Configurable Cards for Quick Insights
Customizable Navigation Menu
Learning
Acknowledgment Lesson Type
Enhancing Learner Compliance with New Acknowledgment Type
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: The Acknowledgment lesson type ensures learning isn’t just delivered, it’s confirmed and tracked. This helps organizations strengthen compliance, reduce risk, and demonstrate accountability.
Strengthening Compliance and Accountability
Simplified Administration and Reporting
Observational Checklist
Structured, Consistent Learner Assessments
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: This feature gives Learning Administrators the ability to assess skills and behaviors in a consistent, documented way—critical for compliance, performance tracking, and certification-based learning programs.
Comprehensive and Structured Assessment Framework
Streamlined Administration Capabilities
Enhanced Learning Assignments: Creating
Enhanced Learning: Empowering Managers and Administrators
Availability: Automatically Available
Why this is important: This update reduces manual effort within the content assignment process, improving overall agility within an organization while giving more self service to managers
New Learning Business Processes secured to Learning Core Functional Area
New Assignment and Enrollment Capabilities
Integrations
Cloud Connect for Benefits
Benefits Connector V2
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Can be used whenever a provider specific integration template is not available. Simplifies benefit integration development, maintenance and support.
Ability to Create Simple XML Extracts of:
Benefit Plan Types that are Supported:
File Types
Sun Life Wellness Partnership
Workday Wellness API solution
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: Simplifies benefits management and ensuring Workday Customers stay at the forefront of benefits technology.
Plan Setup API
Enrollment/Eligibility API
Absence API
EOI and Billing API
PECI Integration
Improves Functionality
Availability: Set Up Required
Level of Effort
Why this is important: The PECI (Payroll Effective Change Interface) integration is a full stack integration that enables the transmission of each payroll change sequentially with the effective and entry date for each change. Added fields and improved functionality of existing options allow for a flexible and accurate solution for each client’s needs.
NEW – External Code attribute added data sections
NEW – Retained Compensation Grade Field Attributes
UPDATED – Field Attribute Description Updates for clarity
NEW – Clawback Date Field Attribute
NEW – External Payroll Input Field Attributes
