Read time: 8.5 minutes

You’re enjoying your first sip of coffee, and you get a message from the payroll team. 

“Hey, can you pull the total FSA contributions per worker for the year to date?”

Simple enough. *sip*

You start digging through Workday’s standard Payroll reports. 

They seem promising until you realize what every payroll veteran already knows: cumbersome prompts, not enough of the data you need, and waaaay too much of the data you don’t need 🫠

So you ask the payroll team how they've been pulling this themselves.

Two reports exported to excel, a vlookup, and a pivot table later, you leave the call determined, there’s got to be a better way.

Well, there is. And the good news is you don't need to be a payroll expert, or go toooo deep into the calc field rabbit hole to solve it.

In this issue, you’ll build a payroll report that pulls pay components cleanly, answers the question quickly, and gives you a calc field pattern you can reuse the next time the payroll team comes a knockin’ ✊

Here’s what that knock might sound like:

“Can you pull total 2025 401(k) contributions so we can reconcile against the vendor file?"

"We need sign on bonus payouts for H1 — can you get those by next week?"

"Can you send over overtime and double-time totals this quarter for all hourly workers?”

If any of these sound familiar, you’re in the right place.

Conceptually, these requests break down into the same three questions your payroll team wants answered. And these answers drive every build decision you’re about to make.