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Squirrels are burying acorns and acorn woodpeckers (yes, that’s a real thing 😄) are stuffing them into every available nook and cranny.

Payroll teams are no exception — they have their own winter preparations to make!

And there's plenty you HRIS folks can do to help starting now.

Here’s your field guide: what info gather, what to watch for in January, and how to roll into February feeling good (or maybe even a little smug!) about your preparations 😌

Let’s dig in.

This is your chance to be proactive and get ahead of some of the year-end madness.

First up…

Year End brings together a lot of moving parts, some of which extend beyond Payroll, like:

These all converge during an already busy time of year.

As your Payroll team maps out its year-end activities, consider how those timelines intersect with upcoming config changes, integrations, and data loads.

Pay close attention to dependencies, competing deadlines, and anything that could introduce unexpected payroll activity late in the year (hey there, backdated Benefit Plan changes! 👋).

And be sure to revisit last year's lessons learned. Were there any unexpected issues, last-minute fixes, or manual workarounds? If so, now's a good time to make sure history doesn't repeat itself ♻

Depending on your organization's security configuration, some of these year-end tasks may fall to HRIS, Payroll, Benefits, or Finance. Confirm who's taking care of what so the responsible party is crystal clear to everyone 💎

Some components across your tenant are calendar-dependent, like:

Make sure each of these gets extended into the new year! Or else, you may experience widespread panic caused by errors and holdups across your tenant from time tracking, to absence, to accounting — something you’re sure to want to avoid 🥵

While you’re at it, consider giving your Scheduled Future Processes a spring or summer expiration date instead. There's already enough going on at Year End without a bunch of items expiring at the same time.

Come January, Payroll’s going to need certain reconciliation reports to help validate the “why” behind a W-2’s final numbers. Wait until then, and you may find yourself building calc fields under pressure 😬

Instead, get ahead! Ask Payroll what they need and what they typically hobble together manually. Then, build those reports while things are still (relatively) calm.

There’s one common Payroll need you definitely want ready: reporting on related calculations, like Supplemental Taxable Wages, by worker across any date range. It takes four nested calc fields, and once it’s built, you can reuse the calc field pattern for tons of different payroll questions that come your way.

Start with the Workday-delivered dashboard Payroll Compliance Updates. This reveals any changes that may require setup by you or your payroll team.

Then, if there are any new payroll taxes coming, such as the Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) tax, effective January 2027, make sure they're configured as the necessary updates become available. One easily overlooked step is mapping those new taxes in your Posting Rules.

Run a payroll for the new year in a test tenant and check for amounts hitting suspense accounts or errors during journal creation. The delivered report Payroll Accounting by Company/Period is a great place to look for posting issues.

With that, you’ve cleared some clutter. Now comes the hard part — keeping everyone from making a new mess! 🙃

As the final payroll periods approach, December is about reducing noise and preparing for W-2 publication.

This isn't the time to get cute with mid-period effective-dated changes or introduce “nice to haves.”

Push back on things that aren't business critical, and see what can wait 'til the dust settles. A little restraint now can save everyone a lot of headaches later.

Year End is a popular time to launch an employee data review campaign, encouraging everyone to log into Workday and review their personal information. For some employees, it might be their first visit in weeks months a hot minute 🔥

Keep an eye on the changes that come through, particularly those requiring approval or additional action.

Home address changes, benefit events, and leave of absence requests can all get held up in someone's inbox, especially when approvers are up to their eyeballs in their own year-end work or out for the holidays.

The Workday-delivered report Business Process Transactions Awaiting Action helps you spot transactions that may need a nudge before the final payrolls of the year. Use it as-is, or make a copy and tweak it to fit your needs.

You can also pair your analysis with mass action using the handy Mass Operation Management (MOM) function to advance, escalate, or reassign outstanding tasks in bulk.

Before everyone disappears for the holidays, make sure current and former employees will be able to easily access their tax documents once W-2s are published at the end of January.

For example, does the security group Terminee As Self have access to the domain Self-Service: Payroll (My Tax Documents) - USA?

Review your Termination BP for the service steps Terminate User Account and Reset User Account. Are they configured to support former employee access?

The right security permissions won't do any good if someone's account has expired!

Then, proxy as a terminated employee in a test tenant and see how easy it is to find their W-2.

Consider configuring an announcement (like this! 👇) on the Home Dashboard to help point them in the right direction.

The employee experience doesn't end on someone's last day, so be sure to give the former employee experience a little love, too ❤️

And just like that, the winter solstice is upon us. The days are at their shortest, but Payroll days are at their longest 😭

The calendar has turned, and Payroll still isn’t out of the woods.

Year-end tax data is heading to vendors, correction payrolls are being processed, and there's still plenty of opportunity for a few surprises.

Keep an eye on vendor deadlines and be ready to help troubleshoot discrepancies, particularly those involving subject or taxable wages.

Subject wages are earnings subject to a particular tax, while taxable wages are the portion of this that’s actually taxed.

Manual payroll corrections made throughout the year can sometimes throw these balances off, and if the discrepancies aren't caught before W-2s are issued, you could be looking at W-2cs down the road.

During this time, you might find yourself investigating payroll results from quarters past, researching why an employee's FICA exemption wasn't applied correctly, or preparing EIB loads for larger batches of last-minute corrections.

This is where those reports you built in November earn their keep 😉

Corrections might be required as a result of:

Meanwhile, the first payroll of the new year brings its own set of challenges:

Partner with Payroll to investigate unexpected results, especially anything that calculated correctly in December but looks different in January.

Imbolc, the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox, marks the first stirrings of spring. And with it comes another seasonal phenomenon: the annual migration of former employees back to Workday in search of their W-2s.

Prepare yourself for any issues that may arise as a result of employees reviewing their tax documents. While HRIS isn’t the first line of defense for W-2 questions, don't be surprised if Payroll comes a-knockin' for additional support.

Before you block this year-end experience from your memory, revisit what went well and what didn't.

Not every payroll issue starts in Payroll. Sometimes the root cause is an upstream process in HCM, Recruiting, Compensation, or Benefits.

Dig into business process transactions, eligibility rules, and other configuration to identify opportunities to prevent payroll issues from happening in the first place.

Then…

Ask yourselves these questions:

Capture those lessons while they're still fresh, and decide what should change (or what belongs on your roadmap) before the next Year End cycle.

Ahhhhh, what a relief to be on the other side of Year End 😌

Some extra preparation and cross-team collaboration can go a long way, leaving your team with a little “spring” in their step as the next season rolls around.

Did this issue help you out? Make you laugh? Did we miss any mission critical or helpful details?

Drop a comment below 👩🏻‍💻 or email us at 📧 [email protected] — we'd love to know your thoughts 😊