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The Reality of the CA Pay Data: What You Should Know and How Workday Can Help

The Reality of the CA Pay Data: What You Should Know and How Workday Can Help

SB-973 sounds like one of those submarine movies that Hollywood produces to inspire a unifying sense of claustrophobia and renew our collective fear of drowning.

In reality, SB-973 is a new California law requiring pay reporting by gender and ethnicity, to renew our fears of tight turnarounds and the pressures of regulatory reporting.

Perhaps first impressions and reality aren’t so different after all.

If you are already in the depths of EEO-1 reporting, these new requirements may have snuck under your radar. However, private companies with 100 or more employees, who have at least one employee in California, are now required to submit their data to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) by March 31st. Though this data resembles the discontinued EEO-1 Component 2 requirements, California has their own unique codes and reporting requirements to follow. In total, there are over 2,500 data combinations that employee populations fall into for your count stats – providing hours of Workday data dumps, Excel pivot tables and vlookups. Truly, a process full of heart-pounding enjoyment.

Thankfully, a matrix report can be created out of Workday to emulate the upload format and simplify the reporting process.  With a few calc fields and system configuration reviews, such as hours pay categories, you will be on your way to running a report that will be just about upload ready. Below are some tips and tricks to help you on your way and hopefully eliminate an otherwise manual process:

The first step is to review the CA Pay Data Report template layout provided from the DFEH. This is your guide for your Workday calc fields so that you can set up the necessary field names that are required for the California submissions. The new CA Pay Data Report is similar to the previous job and pay band reporting requirements for EEO-1 Component 2. Workday has created standard reports for Component 2, however be aware that the reporting format and requirements are not the same as the current CA Pay Data requirements, which can make repurposing those Xpresso reports’ data output challenging. The key differences include how hours worked are calculated and the appropriate pay data to use for the pay bands (Component 2 uses W2 Box 1 while CA asks for W2 Box 5).  For the pay and hours calculations data, as well as all other data requirements, please refer to the California law Government Code section 12999, SB-973 for more detailed information. https://www.dfeh.ca.gov/paydatareporting/

To begin, map the job categories to the appropriate codes. EEO-1 has job categories that Workday has provided as a standard field.  By creating an Evaluate Expression (EE) calculation, a calculated field that has true/false conditions used to transform data, it will be the savior for translating those job categories to the assigned codes. 

Pay Bands are another category which California has provided the ranges and the associated codes for the W2-Box 5 wage requirements.  Use the Lookup Range Band (LRB) calc field and in one calc field, you’ll have all your range bands set to the appropriate code!

The number of the hours worked, including paid time off hours, can be gathered in several different ways, depending on how this data is configured in your tenant. Often, these calculations will be Sum Related Instances (SRIs), which summarize counts based on similar conditions.

And last is the Race/Ethnicity/Gender category.  These three self id categories have many combinations with code assignments.  For example, Non-Hispanic – Female – Black or African American would have a code C20.    To set these up, utilize the True/False Condition calc field and create all the combinations.  Then you can use the ever so clever Evaluation Expression calc field to review an employee’s data and return the corresponding code. Note: The codes for this group will need to be created via Text Constant calc fields to create the specific code, as in the example above, C20.

Those calc fields you created are just waiting to be put into a Matrix report with the groupings that you need for the output.  As a bonus, you can put all the detail data in the Drill Down section of the report so that you can review your information prior to sending. Auditing your data is essential to accurate submissions!

In the end, your matrix report will look something like this:

Row Grouping:

  • Company/Location (Establishment)
  • Lookup Related Value (LRV) to Establishment’s Address Line 1 (Worker > Company or Location > Primary Address)
  • LRV to Employee Count (Worker > Company or Location > Employee Count)
  • EE Job Category
  • EE Gender/Ethnicity
  • LRB Pay Bands

Summarization

  • Count
  • Pay Data
  • SRI Total Hours Worked and Paid

We hope this has helped you to visualize that pulling some data for annual requirements can be done with ease. As with all Workday reporting, your fields may vary a bit depending on your unique configurations. If some of this data lives outside of Workday, but you still want Workday to do the heavy report lifting, consider loading the information into custom objects so that you can reference those values in your reports. 

With a little calc field creativity, meeting this new requirement will be smooth sailing!

Authors

  • Rachel has been in the Workday ecosystem for over 8 years, including an implementation on the client side and post production support in many areas of HCM, specializing in Benefits, Absence and Reporting. Having worked in the financial sector as both an accountant, auditor and systems consultant, she enjoys digging into the details of business processes. She helped to spearhead the design of the Kognitiv EEO reporting tool, which helps clients to audit the required filing data and eliminate manual processing for filing. She loves solving puzzles and finding solutions to streamline processes in Workday.

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  • Luke Jandl

    Luke is a Workday consultant with 5 years of experience, specializing in HCM, Advanced Compensation, BIRT, Reporting and Data Conversion.

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