Workday: Payroll by Strada and Global Payroll Connect

Recently, Workday trumpeted some exciting news featuring two significant payroll innovations that global organizations and Workday followers have largely overlooked. For those who were not able to attend Workday Rising, the following highlights are meant to shed light on the powerful leap forward for multi-country payroll.

In the Workday ecosystem, there is a category of partners identified as Payroll Connect Partners that was initially comprised of five or six organizations specializing in multi-country payroll. They have expanded to include nearly thirty managed payroll partners maintaining pre-built integrations for the U.S. or countries they serve. One of these payroll partners stands above the rest with the announcement of a new SKU (module) — Workday Payroll by Strada. Following this first-ever partner technology, SKU is a major enhancement to its global payroll connectivity in a move to next generation API protocol, known as Global Payroll Connect (GPC).

Workday Payroll by Strada

Alight customers will be the first to recognize Strada as the newly created brand for its spinoff of payroll and professional services in July 2024. Despite the newness of the name, services by Strada are a long-standing compilation of best-in-class Workday deployment services, managed payroll on the customers’ own Workday tenant, and a robust rest-of-world payroll engine.

Until now, what has been understated about Workday Payroll by Strada is it will be offered as a module or SKU available for purchase on the Workday Order Form, just as any other native Workday technology. No other payroll partner technology has collaborated to such an extent, with more than a year of thorough vetting and alignment of its global engine. The technical support and SLAs are all parts of the Workday platform, pricing, and agreement when purchased as part of the Workday subscription. In effect, Strada’s global payroll technology has obtained Workday’s backing.

Strada advocates for “Workday first” for payroll and brings its own multi-country payroll engine, Strada Pay. to 36 countries and counting Through this unique collaboration with Workday, Strada allows customers to buy the technology directly, or as part of their Workday subscription, separate from whichever managed payroll services are needed. Strada has emerged as one of only two organizations that deliver managed payroll and benefits administration services on Workday where they are available. Employees view pay slips through Workday, where dashboards and reports are part of the overarching employee and manager experience.

The Workday Payroll by Strada engine will include all certified connectors, so there is no need to separately purchase the Cloud Connect for Third Party Payroll (CCTPP). Existing Workday customers convert their CCTPP SKU to a Workday Payroll by Strada SKU. As you might imagine, the local country payroll integrations must be deployed by Strada, who is pleased to support ongoing AMS for payroll only, or for the full Workday suite.

Global Payroll Connect

The second part of the Workday global payroll announcement introduces the newest protocol for global payroll integration. The hypothetical scenario below depicts the critical passing of data between Workday and any of its Payroll Connect partners. Partners agree to maintain a pre-built, bi-directional integration certified for each country following prescribed norms. By doing so, Workday and the partner organization agree to maintain the integration for future system changes (e.g., field name, character length, required values) to avoid errors and disconnects as enhancements are made.

PICOF was the integration protocol originally used for partner-building cloud connect integrations. A new protocol, PECI, was introduced in 2016, and has become the predominant standard because of the greater visibility, automated corrections and enhanced data integrity, as summarized by Workday partner Cloudpay in a 2021 blog post. It should come as no surprise that Workday is moving to a new protocol based on real-time data exchange via API. This new protocol, called “Global Payroll Connect,” will be available beginning in October 2024. This update will send Payroll Connect Partners on a new journey to pre-build a GPC connector for each country, inbound and outbound.

Strada had a hand in developing the API protocol and has a jumpstart with the GPC connectors available in fifty-seven countries. Expect to see announcements from other Payroll Connect partners regarding their progress toward adopting GPC. When evaluating a Workday payroll partner, be sure to confirm the specific protocols available country by country. In anticipation of this week’s Workday Rising event, two of Workday’s OG partners, CloudPay and Safeguard Global, made their own noise about the Global Payroll Connect APIs.