Effective Dating for Service Dates: Absence Impacts and How to Prepare

Did you know that you can now make Worker service date changes effective dated in Workday? Prior to this enhancement, before/after values for Service Date changes could be referenced in a Worker’s Worker History, however, the effective date of the change would always default to the entry date.

As a result, absence calculations referencing service dates simply returned values from the most recently entered service date change, regardless of whether or not it applied to the period being evaluated. In other words, the most recently entered service date change would be applied to both future and historical periods. This behavior can be especially problematic for rehired or acquired employees whose service dates need to store both historical and current values to correctly calculate their absence accruals.

Now you can effective date worker service date change events, allowing for not only retention of historical values but also for time off accrual calculations to retrieve a worker’s service dates based on the period being evaluated. This is all great news BUT you must ensure that you’re taking the appropriate steps to prepare for this enhancement to ensure that it doesn’t break your existing absence configuration.

The “Effective Dating for Service Dates” feature was introduced in the 2023R2 release as an opt-in feature. Workday will be removing the ability to opt-in with the 2025R1 release and will it be automatically enabled in Production tenants for all customers on March 15, 2025 (safe harbor). The feature is already automatically enabled in all customers’ Preview tenants, so this is a great place to start with your preparation and testing!

How do you prepare for the upcoming changes? First, enable the “Set Up: Tenant Setup – Tenant Analyzer” security domain in your Preview tenant, so that the Tenant Analyzer can be run. Search for “Tenant Analyzer Validations” and run it for the “Absence” Product and “Calculations” Areas. Items relevant to the service dates feature will appear similar to the following, and will include a list of the affected calculations:

“At least 1 component configuration includes the Worker: [X] Service Date calculation, which doesn’t reference the most recent service date. Using calculations without effective-dated service dates might lead to incorrect results.”

To elaborate, any “Worker” service date fields (i.e. Worker: Continuous Service Date) being used in Absence calculations should be replaced with the new “recent” service date fields. Examples of the new fields include:

• Recent Continuous Service Date based on Period Start Date
• Recent Continuous Service Date based on Period End Date
• Recent Hire Date as of Period Start Date
• Recent Hire Date as of Period End Date
• Recent Seniority Date Based on Period Start Date
• Recent Seniority Date Based on Period End Date
• Recent Time Off Service Date Based on Period Start Date
• Recent Time Off Service Date Based on Period End Date
• Recent Union Seniority Date Based on Period Start Date
• Recent Union Seniority Date Based on Period End Date

This is not an exhaustive list but does include some of the most commonly used service date fields in Absence. So, which field should you use – the one based on Period Start Date or Period End Date?  Most calculations will require the use of the “Recent [X] Service Date Based on Period End Date.”  Why?  Because service dates are tied to the worker (not the position) and so the values persist even after a worker’s termination. However, you will need to review your time off plan’s specific configuration to confirm which field is the best fit for your needs.

NOTE: The Tenant Analyzer will not identify calculations where the “Worker: Hire Date” field is the only service date field being referenced. To ensure these calculations are also updated with the new “recent” fields, you can search for the “Worker: Hire Date” calculation in your tenant via the “View Instance Value Calculation (Workday Owned)” task (just be sure to exclude the colon from your search string, as it doesn’t play nicely). Then view the “Usage” tab to identify any calculations that are using it.

At this point in the process, you should have a comprehensive list of the calculations that need to be updated with the new fields and have identified which of them should be used for each instance. Before you get too ambitious and start updating your calculations, STOP! Since absence calculations are not effective-dated, it’s typically best practice to copy the existing calculations, replace the old service date fields with the new ones, and then replace the calculations on the accruals using a new snapshot date.  Using this method will help to ensure that you don’t inadvertently impact historical time off balances. 

Once you’ve either created new calculations using the new fields or updated the existing calculations, make sure you TEST, TEST, TEST!  As previously mentioned, Sandbox Preview is an ideal tenant to conduct your testing since the opt-in feature is already enabled. If other ongoing initiatives may conflict with testing in that tenant, you can alternatively opt-in to the “Effective Dating for Service Dates” feature under the “Maintain Feature Opt-Ins” task in any implementation or sandbox tenant. Just remember – once you opt-in, you can’t opt out! Aside from standard employee test scenarios, it’s recommended that you also include scenarios for:

• Rehired workers
• Terminations
• Workers with changes to their service dates (both retroactively and future-dated)
• Mid-period hires

You can take the following steps to test configuration update impacts on the overall workforce:

1. Create a report (or run an existing one) to gather current time off balances for workers and save the results.
2. Create your new absence calculations using the new service date fields and replace the existing calculations on the affected accruals using a new snapshot date.
3. Re-run the report from step 1 and compare the balances to the saved report results from step 1.
4. Analyze and understand any differences.
5. Enter your test cases.
6. Re-run the report from step 1 and compare the balances to the saved report results from step 1 and step 3.

The “Effective Dating for Service Dates” feature is a useful enhancement that will improve absence accrual and eligibility calculations that reference worker service dates. However, Workday customers must test their existing time off configuration and make the necessary adjustments to their absence calculations referencing service dates to ensure there are no unintended impacts when the feature is enabled in their tenants. Following the steps outlined in this article will help you to achieve this, but if you find that you need some assistance, Kognitiv is here to help!