Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM integration

What moves between them

Worker records, cost centers, departments, positions, and organization hierarchies flow from Workday HCM into Workday Financial Management on a schedule tied to your payroll and planning cycles. Cost center and organizational data are synchronized bidirectionally so that payroll cost allocations in Workday HCM reference GL dimensions that already exist in Workday Financial Management. GL account hierarchies and worktags are read from Workday Financial Management to validate that incoming payroll allocations match the target chart of accounts. The integration runs as a polling schedule because neither system supports webhooks; recommended intervals are daily for organization and cost center data and every 15 to 60 minutes for worker and compensation updates.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores the OAuth2 refresh token for each module and exchanges it for a 60-minute access token on each call, refreshing before expiry so no request fails due to token age. Because both Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM require ISU setup on the customer side and operate within the same tenant, ml-connector validates that both API endpoints are reachable and both ISU accounts have the required security group permissions before starting a sync. The integration polls Workday HCM for worker changes using date-range filters to identify new hires, transfers, and terminations, then writes or updates those records in Workday Financial Management via SOAP, which supports full CRUD on workers and organization entities. Cost center and department changes are synchronized first, so every worker record references a cost center that already exists in the target module. Both systems return HTTP 429 when rate limits are hit, so ml-connector backs off and retries with exponential jitter, and it tracks the refresh token expiry so a token refresh does not turn into an outage. Every record carries a full audit trail, and failed worker or cost center updates can be replayed manually once the root cause is resolved.

A real-world example

A mid-market services firm runs Workday as a single tenant for both finance and HR, but the two modules are managed by separate teams. The finance team runs monthly close cycles that require cost center detail down to the assignment level, and the HR team processes payroll with the same cost center codes. Before the integration, changes to cost centers took two weeks to flow from payroll into the GL, and month-end close required manual spot-checks to find cost center mismatches between Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management. With the integration enabled, cost centers and worker assignments sync automatically each day, so the finance team starts close with cost center dimensions already validated, and the HR team can confidently allocate payroll without worrying about downstream GL rejection.

What you can do

• •Sync worker records, cost centers, and organization hierarchies from Workday HCM into Workday Financial Management on a daily or hourly schedule.
• •Validate that cost center and GL account dimensions exist in Workday Financial Management before writing worker updates, so payroll allocation lines reference valid GL accounts.
• •Authenticate to both modules using OAuth2 refresh tokens, manage token expiry, and retry on rate limit responses.
• •Handle SOAP and REST API differences between the two modules, including SOAP CRUD for workers and REST read-only for reference data.
• •Maintain a full audit trail of every worker, cost center, and organization change, with manual replay of failed updates.

Questions

Can ml-connector sync general ledger entries between Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM?

No. The integration syncs organizational and worker reference data (cost centers, departments, positions, workers) from Workday HCM into Workday Financial Management, and optionally validates GL account hierarchies and worktags. Journal entries and GL account balances are read-only for audit purposes. If you need to post labor cost journals, that typically requires a payroll-specific integration between a payroll processor and Workday Financial Management.

What happens if a cost center in Workday HCM does not exist in Workday Financial Management?

ml-connector checks for cost center existence before writing worker records and returns an error if the target cost center is missing. The integration supports a pre-sync step to create missing cost centers in Workday Financial Management, or you can manually create them in the target module before running the sync.

Do both Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM need to be in the same tenant?

Yes. Both modules are accessed via the same Workday instance, and the integration assumes a single tenant with both modules enabled. Each module requires its own ISU account with appropriate security group permissions for the data being synced; your Workday administrator must configure these before the integration can connect.