Workday Financial Management and UKG integration

What moves between them

The main flow runs from UKG into Workday Financial Management. Employee records and cost center data sync in both directions so your Workday organizational structure matches UKG. After each payroll period, ml-connector reads UKG's GL payroll export and posts the labor cost journals into Workday's general ledger, mapped to the matching GL accounts and cost centers in your chart of accounts. Because Workday exposes no native webhook system, ml-connector polls UKG employee and payroll data on a schedule tied to your payroll calendar and cost reporting cycle.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores UKG credentials encrypted and switches between Basic Auth and OAuth2 based on your configuration. On the Workday side it uses the tenant-specific ISU account and SOAP endpoint for journal submission and GL account validation, with OAuth2 bearer tokens for REST reads. Because Workday is pull-only, ml-connector polls UKG at intervals you define and applies date-range filters to avoid re-processing the same records. Employee IDs are fetched first from UKG's employee-ids endpoint and then hydrated with full profiles in a second pass. Cost centers and GL accounts are mapped and validated before any journal posting, ensuring payroll lines land on existing Workday dimensions. UKG OAuth tokens refresh automatically when they expire at the 1-hour mark, and ml-connector handles rate-limit retries from both systems with exponential backoff. Every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream Workday journal submission fails.

A real-world example

A mid-sized professional services firm runs Workday Financial Management for accounts, procurement, and financial reporting, and uses UKG for payroll and HR across multiple offices. Before the integration, the accounting team pulled payroll journals from UKG each period and manually created journal entries in Workday to record labor costs to the correct cost centers, a process prone to rounding errors and misallocations across offices. New hires and terminations in UKG sometimes took weeks to sync to the Workday org chart. With Workday and UKG connected, each payroll run's GL data flows into Workday automatically, allocated to the correct cost center per office, and employee records stay in sync. The manual journal entry step is gone, month-end close runs faster, and the org chart is always current.

What you can do

• •Sync UKG employee records and cost center hierarchies into Workday Financial Management so your org chart matches your payroll system.
• •Post UKG payroll GL journals into Workday after each pay period, mapped to your chart of accounts and cost centers.
• •Authenticate Workday via SOAP ISU credentials and OAuth2 refresh tokens, and UKG via Basic Auth and API keys or OAuth2 client credentials.
• •Poll UKG on a schedule you control with date-range filtering to avoid re-processing, with retries and exponential backoff on rate limits.
• •Maintain a complete audit trail of every employee sync and payroll journal, with replay capability if a Workday submission fails.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Workday Financial Management and UKG?

The primary flow is from UKG into Workday Financial Management. Employee records, cost centers, and payroll GL journals move from UKG into Workday. Cost center and GL account mappings are validated in both directions so Workday dimensions stay aligned with UKG. Workday journal entries are read-only so ml-connector does not write financial entries back into UKG.

How does ml-connector handle Workday's lack of webhooks and UKG's dual authentication?

Because Workday has no native webhooks, ml-connector polls UKG on a schedule tied to your payroll calendar and applies date-range filters to avoid re-processing. For UKG authentication, ml-connector detects and uses either Basic Auth with API keys or OAuth2 client credentials based on your configuration. UKG OAuth tokens are refreshed automatically when they approach their 1-hour expiry.

What happens if a payroll GL journal fails to post into Workday?

Every record carries a full audit trail and a unique job ID. If a Workday journal submission fails, ml-connector logs the error and can replay the record once the issue is resolved, ensuring no data loss and eliminating the need for manual re-entry or bank reconciliation delays.