Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Here are some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Workday and seven other vendors in seven categories, five product-related (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two concerning the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each of the seven categories to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on data derived from our benchmark research on payroll software.

Workday provides payroll management via its Human Capital Management platform and ranks seventh in this Value Index. The vendor is a Value Index Leader in both Reliability and Adaptability.

Using a one-platform strategy, Workday offers capabilities that extend into financial management, which helps minimize errors and integration overhead related to human resources and payroll while enabling richer data analyses. The vendor provides robust and actionable analytics and its command center makes it easy to move quickly from a payroll issue to root-cause analysis and action. The command center also makes it easy to oversee pay cycle progress and compliance updates. Workday takes advantage of AI and machine learning to better streamline processing and provide insights, including guidance on the best time to run an audit based on transaction volumes and machine resources.

Workday leads the market in terms of providing business insights and mitigating operational risks but lags behind some competitors in pay-on-demand and pay cards. The vendor says it soon will provide the ability to schedule multiple pay calculations on a single run, but other products have featured this for some time. In addition, while the product is comprehensive it is also complex and deployments could be easier to manage. Workday’s TCO/ROI rating would also improve with more case studies and better business case support specific to its payroll software offering.

Since our Value Index analysis, Workday has added new features to its Payroll product to enhance the paycheck experience for all workers — including contingent, gig and freelance workers — by enabling them to access information and view paychecks not produced by Workday.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of payroll software in the industry. You can learn more about our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool here. Participating vendors can learn more about how to use the Value Index here.