Workday 2024 Release 1 (R1), the company’s most recent biannual release, offers a significant improvement to HCM, Financial Management, Analytics, and the whole Workday platform. We’ll go over the essential information of Workday 2024 R1 release in this post.

About Workday Releases

Workday delivers new features and fixes through weekly service updates and larger semiannual releases. Service updates provide minor enhancements and patches. Major releases like 2024 R1 include more significant capabilities requiring customer adoption.

Workday’s releases follow a naming convention of the year and release number. 2024 R1 is the first major release of 2024, coming after extensive input from customers and testing.

Top HCM Innovations in Workday 2024 R1

The 2024 R1 release incorporates several big updates for Workday Human Capital Management:

Enhanced Hire Process- The hire workflow gets UI updates and more configurable options to improve the experience for hiring managers. This allows tailoring to specific needs.

Benefit Billing Capabilities- New features like insufficient funds status for employees provide greater control and management over benefits billing and administration.

Recruiting Tools- Workday introduces new 2024 R1 recruiting capabilities like Paradox AI chatbots to engage and assist candidates, as well as support for virtual/in-person recruiting events.

Consent Management- Employees can now provide consent preferences for use of personal data, enabling greater transparency.

Together these updates create a more streamlined, tailored hiring and HR management experience for organizations using Workday HCM.

Key Workday 2024 R1 Updates for Financials

Major financial management innovations in Workday 2024 R1 include:

Faster Transaction Processing- Background processing for high-volume accounting tasks dramatically improves transaction speeds.

Smarter Spend Classification- With machine learning advancements, the system is now better equipped to automatically categorize expenses.

Expanded Planning- New modeling capabilities allow customers to forecast and plan for more scenarios in financial planning.

Richer Reporting- Financial data can now be combined with HCM, Prism Analytics, and other data sets for multi-dimensional reporting and insights.

Improved Invoice Workflows- More controls and automation for PO-based invoice workflows.

These updates make financial operations faster, smarter, and more efficient for Workday customers.

New Analytics Capabilities in Workday 2024 R1

For analytics, Workday 2024 R1 delivers:

Additional Metrics- Providing more out-of-the-box metrics across HCM, Financials, and People Analytics for greater insights.

Custom Metric Creation- New ability to build and configure custom metrics using various data sources as required.

Enhanced Prism Analytics- Features like connectors, relationship discovery, and more enable easier access to data for analysis.

Mobile Analytics Upgrades- Prism Mobile app gets improvements for data exploration and insights on the go.

These enhancements equip customers with greater access to analytics for informed decisions.

Other Important Workday 2024 R1 Highlights

Beyond the major domains covered, Workday 2024 R1 also includes:

Beefed Up Security- Improved tenant isolation, role-based access, and automated security changes provide greater protection.

Faster App Development- New tooling and frameworks enable faster building of extensions and apps.

Accessibility Improvements- Enhanced WCAG compliance makes Workday more accessible.

Better User Experience- Various updates to UI, information presentation, and workflows.

Conclusion

Workday 2024 R1 represents a major update across HCM, Financials, Analytics, and the broader Workday platform. Customers should evaluate the new capabilities and plan adoption to maximize value. Opkey provides no-code Workday test automation, enabling users of all skill levels to streamline update testing. With built-in intelligence, Opkey analyzes and automatically generates scripts. Change impact analysis reports prioritize testing on critical Workday elements. Pre-built accelerators for functional, regression, performance and security testing reduce SME workload by over 70%. Test discovery mines a unique Workday environment, identifying gaps to improve coverage. Opkey is the leading choice for simple, intelligent Workday testing automation that increases efficiency and reduces risk.