With its latest spring-time release, Workday 2026R1 brings fresh enhancements designed to streamline operations across Human Capital Management (HCM), Payroll, Financials (FIN), and the underlying Platform. For organizations looking to maintain their edge, understanding these updates is essential for a smooth transition and for leveraging new efficiencies.
At Teamup9, we specialize in helping organizations navigate these semi-annual updates. Below, we explore the highlights of the 2026R1 release, focusing on the features that provide the most significant value to the broader Workday community.
Driving Precision and Agility in Financial Management
For finance teams, the Workday 2026R1 release offers powerful new tools for reconciliation and billing flexibility. Two standout features aim to reduce manual work and improve financial accuracy:
- Transaction Tax Reconciliation: Workday has introduced a new transaction tax reconciliation framework. This allows teams to reconcile tax details from taxable transactions directly to tax ledger accounts at period close. By eliminating the need to download multiple external reports to reconcile tax data, this feature streamlines the period-close process and increases confidence in tax declarations.
- Multiple Due Dates for Customer Invoices: Recognizing that not all billing follows a simple net-30 structure, you can now create payment schedules by assigning multiple due dates to a single customer invoice. This enables more accurate tracking of open amounts and provides customers with clear payment schedule details directly on their invoices, improving cash flow transparency.
Elevating HCM and Payroll Performance
In this release, Workday continues to refine its core HCM and Payroll functionality with a focus on system performance and data accuracy. One of the standout HCM features is Time Off Balance Storage and Change Detection. This update significantly improves the performance of tasks related to time off balances. By optimizing how these balances are stored and detected, Workday reduces manual effort for HR administrators and ensures that workers see the most accurate, up-to-date information in their self-service portals.
For Payroll administrators, the Advanced Lookup Table Snapshot Selection addresses performance challenges when managing high-volume payroll data. Administrators can now select specific snapshots when viewing or editing lookup tables, which reduces data processing loads, results in faster page loads, and improves overall system stability during critical pay cycles.
Platform Power: Reporting and Deployment Enhancements
The Workday Platform serves as the foundation for all functional areas, and 2026R1 brings several notable improvements to reporting and application lifecycle management:
- Object Transporter for Financials and Spend: This update improves the ability to migrate configuration data—such as accounts payable settings and procurement rules—from one tenant to another. This reduces the risk of manual configuration errors during testing and deployment phases.
- Enhanced Visualization: Report Writer now includes Funnel Charts and Scatterplot Charts. Funnel charts are particularly useful for identifying drop-offs in linear processes like recruitment pipelines, while scatterplots enable deeper visual analysis of data correlations.
Mandatory Changes and Retirements to Watch
Preparation for Workday 2026R1 requires more than just looking at new features; it also involves managing the retirement of legacy tools. We recommend prioritizing the following mandatory changes:
- People Experience Search Retirement: Workday is officially retiring the older People Experience Search. Organizations must transition to the new search experience to ensure users can continue to find people, tasks, and reports efficiently.
- Primary and Additional Nationality Fields: The retirement of legacy nationality fields is reaching its final stage. Organizations must update their reports and calculated fields to use the new locale-sensitive fields.
- Documentation Retention Policy Update: This is a mandatory update to how Workday handles documentation retention within integrations, ensuring your tenant remains compliant with global data privacy standards.
Partnering for a Seamless Transition
The Workday 2026R1 release is another step toward a more automated and user-friendly Workday experience. However, the volume of changes—especially the mandatory field retirements and search transitions—can be significant for busy internal teams.
At Teamup9, we help you cut through the noise. Our experts can assist you in performing impact assessments, updating your custom reports, and training your end-users on new features like Transaction Tax Reconciliation or the latest visualization tools. For the admin team, the reusable configurations feature will certainly be something to look at. If you want to ensure your Workday tenant remains optimized and compliant, let’s start a conversation about how we can support your Workday 2026R1 journey.