Paylocity + Workday REST
Sync Paylocity and Workday REST to Unify Your HR and Workforce Data
Automate employee lifecycle events, payroll data, and HR records between Paylocity and Workday — no manual intervention required.
Why integrate Paylocity and Workday REST?
Paylocity and Workday are two of the most widely adopted HR and workforce management platforms, each handling distinct parts of the employee data, payroll, and talent puzzle. Organizations running both systems often end up with fragmented employee records, duplicate data entry, and synchronization delays that cost real time and money. Integrating Paylocity with Workday REST via tray.ai gives teams an automated bridge between the two platforms, keeping HR data consistent, accurate, and actionable in real time.
Automate & integrate Paylocity & Workday REST
Use case
Automated New Hire Provisioning
When a new employee is created in Workday after offer acceptance and onboarding steps are complete, tray.ai automatically creates or updates the corresponding employee record in Paylocity with all relevant personal, role, and compensation data. HR administrators don't have to re-enter new hire information into a second system. The employee is ready for their first payroll run in Paylocity with no manual touchpoints.
Use case
Employee Termination and Offboarding Sync
When an employee is terminated in Workday, tray.ai triggers an automated workflow that updates the employee's status in Paylocity to stop erroneous payroll processing and deactivates applicable benefits. The integration captures termination reason, final pay details, and effective date to support compliance and accurate record-keeping. HR and payroll teams are notified automatically so they can act on final paycheck requirements without delay.
Use case
Compensation and Salary Change Propagation
Compensation updates approved in Workday — merit increases, promotions, equity adjustments — are automatically pushed to Paylocity to update payroll records with the correct salary, effective date, and pay grade. This removes the lag between an approved compensation change and its appearance in payroll processing. Finance and HR teams can trust that Paylocity always reflects the latest approved compensation data from Workday.
Use case
Organizational Structure and Department Sync
As teams reorganize and cost centers shift in Workday, tray.ai keeps department hierarchies, manager relationships, and cost center assignments in sync in Paylocity. Accurate payroll allocation, labor cost reporting, and budgeting all depend on this. Changes made during headcount planning or reorgs in Workday are automatically reflected in Paylocity without manual updates from HR operations.
Use case
Benefits Enrollment and Election Sync
When employees complete benefits enrollment in Workday, their elections are automatically synchronized to Paylocity so the correct payroll deductions are applied from the next pay period. The integration handles open enrollment events, life event changes, and new hire benefit windows. HR teams no longer need to manually translate benefits elections into payroll deduction records, which cuts errors and reduces the kind of paycheck surprises employees hate.
Use case
Time and Attendance Data Reconciliation
Time and attendance records tracked in Paylocity are automatically reconciled with Workday workforce schedules and job allocations, giving managers and HR a unified view of hours worked against planned headcount. The integration surfaces discrepancies between scheduled and actual hours across both platforms so corrections can happen before payroll closes. This matters most for organizations with complex shift patterns or workforces spread across multiple locations.
Use case
Headcount and Workforce Analytics Reporting
By combining employee data from Paylocity and Workday, tray.ai makes it possible to build consolidated headcount, turnover, and compensation reports that draw from both systems at once. HR analytics teams no longer need to manually export and merge spreadsheets from two platforms to produce workforce insights. Automated report generation means leadership has access to accurate, up-to-date headcount metrics without chasing down data.
Get started with Paylocity & Workday REST integration today
Paylocity & Workday REST Challenges
What challenges are there when working with Paylocity & Workday REST and how will using Tray.ai help?
Challenge
Inconsistent Employee Identifier Mapping
Paylocity and Workday often maintain separate internal employee IDs, making it hard to reliably match records between the two systems — especially when employees transfer, are rehired, or were entered manually in one platform but not the other. Without a solid identifier resolution strategy, integrations risk creating duplicate records or routing updates to the wrong employee.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai lets teams build custom identifier resolution logic directly into their workflows, including lookup tables, cross-reference mappings, and fallback matching strategies based on name, SSN hash, or email address. Every data operation gets matched to the correct employee record in both systems, with error handling to flag unmatched records for manual review.
Challenge
Complex Field Mapping Between HR Data Models
Workday and Paylocity use different data models, terminology, and field structures for common HR concepts like compensation, job classification, and benefit plans. Mapping fields directly between the two systems often requires business logic to translate codes, normalize values, and handle conditional scenarios like multiple pay components or blended roles.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai's visual workflow builder lets teams construct sophisticated field transformation and mapping logic without writing complex code. Configurable lookup tables, conditional branches, and data formatting helpers make it straightforward to translate Workday's structured data model into Paylocity's required formats, with full visibility into how each field is being transformed.
Challenge
Managing Effective-Dated HR Transactions
Many HR changes in Workday — promotions, salary increases, transfers — are effective-dated, meaning they're entered in advance and should only take effect on a specific future date. If integration workflows don't handle effective dating correctly, they risk applying changes in Paylocity too early or out of sequence, causing payroll errors and compliance problems.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai workflows can evaluate effective dates at runtime and delay or schedule downstream actions accordingly. Date comparison logic and scheduled trigger capabilities mean changes are only applied in Paylocity when they're actually effective, preserving the integrity of payroll cycles and historical records.
Challenge
Handling High-Volume Payroll Period Loads
During payroll close periods, open enrollment windows, or large-scale org changes, the volume of records that need to sync between Paylocity and Workday can spike sharply. Batch processing limitations, API rate limits, and concurrent update conflicts can cause delays or failures if the integration isn't built to handle load gracefully.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai's workflow engine handles high-throughput, concurrent operations with built-in retry logic, rate limit management, and intelligent batching. Workflows can chunk large datasets, respect API throttle limits for both Paylocity and Workday REST, and automatically retry failed operations — so synchronization stays reliable even during peak payroll processing periods.
Challenge
Audit Trail and Compliance Visibility
HR and payroll data integrations between Paylocity and Workday touch sensitive employee information and have to meet strict audit, compliance, and data governance requirements. Without comprehensive logging of what changed, when it changed, and what system triggered the change, organizations risk failing internal audits or regulatory reviews.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai provides detailed execution logs for every workflow run, capturing input data, transformation steps, API responses, and error states at a granular level. Teams can configure workflows to write structured audit records to a data warehouse or logging system of their choice, so every Paylocity-Workday data transaction is fully traceable and available for compliance review.
Start using our pre-built Paylocity & Workday REST templates today
Start from scratch or use one of our pre-built Paylocity & Workday REST templates to quickly solve your most common use cases.
Paylocity & Workday REST Templates
Find pre-built Paylocity & Workday REST solutions for common use cases
Template
Workday New Hire to Paylocity Employee Creation
This template monitors Workday REST for newly hired employee records and automatically creates the corresponding employee profile in Paylocity, mapping all fields including personal details, job title, department, compensation, and start date. It includes error handling to alert HR teams if a record fails to sync.
Steps:
- Poll Workday REST API for new hire events or trigger via Workday webhook on employee creation
- Map Workday employee fields — name, SSN, job code, department, salary, and start date — to Paylocity employee record schema
- Create the employee record in Paylocity via API and log the result, sending an alert notification if the creation fails
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Paylocity
Template
Paylocity Termination Status Sync to Workday
When an employee termination is recorded or finalized in Paylocity, this template pushes the termination status, effective date, and reason code back to Workday REST so both systems reflect the same offboarding state. It also triggers downstream notifications to IT and facilities teams for access revocation.
Steps:
- Detect termination event in Paylocity via webhook or scheduled polling of employee status changes
- Extract termination details including employee ID, effective date, and reason code from Paylocity response
- Update the corresponding worker record in Workday REST with termination status and trigger notification to configured downstream systems
Connectors Used: Paylocity, Workday REST
Template
Workday Compensation Change to Paylocity Salary Update
This template captures approved compensation change events in Workday — including merit increases, promotions, and market adjustments — and automatically updates the salary and pay rate fields in the corresponding Paylocity employee record with the correct effective date.
Steps:
- Subscribe to Workday compensation change events via REST API polling or event notification
- Validate that the effective date and new compensation values are present and within acceptable business rules
- Patch the employee compensation record in Paylocity with updated salary, pay rate, and effective date, and log the transaction for audit purposes
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Paylocity
Template
Workday Benefits Election to Paylocity Deduction Setup
This template listens for completed benefits enrollment events in Workday and translates employee elections into the appropriate payroll deduction records in Paylocity, so the correct pre-tax and post-tax deduction amounts are applied starting from the next eligible pay period.
Steps:
- Trigger on completed benefits enrollment events from Workday REST, capturing employee ID and all elected benefit plan details
- Map Workday benefit plan codes to Paylocity deduction type codes using a configurable lookup table
- Create or update payroll deduction records in Paylocity with the correct amounts, frequencies, and effective dates
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Paylocity
Template
Bidirectional Employee Profile Delta Sync
This template runs on a scheduled cadence to compare employee profile fields across Paylocity and Workday REST, identify any divergences in address, phone, job title, or department data, and resolve them based on a configurable system-of-record priority rule.
Steps:
- Fetch employee records from both Paylocity and Workday REST on a scheduled interval, keyed by a shared employee identifier
- Compare field-level values between both records and flag any discrepancies using configurable system-of-record priority rules
- Write the authoritative field values to the non-authoritative system and generate a reconciliation report for HR operations review
Connectors Used: Paylocity, Workday REST
Template
Workday Org Change to Paylocity Department Update
This template automatically detects organizational structure changes in Workday — department renames, manager reassignments, cost center reallocations — and propagates those changes to Paylocity to maintain accurate payroll allocation and labor reporting.
Steps:
- Poll Workday REST for organizational unit change events including department, manager, and cost center updates
- Identify all affected employee records in Paylocity using the shared employee or position ID
- Update department, manager, and cost center fields on each affected employee record in Paylocity and log all changes for HR audit review
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Paylocity