Pigment + Workday REST
Connect Pigment and Workday REST to Unify Financial Planning with HR Data
Automate the flow of workforce and financial data between Pigment and Workday to eliminate manual exports and keep your business plans accurate in real time.
Why integrate Pigment and Workday REST?
Pigment is a modern business planning platform built for finance and revenue teams who need flexible, collaborative forecasting. Workday REST is where enterprise HR, workforce, and payroll data lives. Together, they cover the full picture of financial planning — but only if they're talking to each other. Integrating them through tray.ai means headcount changes, compensation updates, and org shifts in Workday automatically show up in your Pigment models, so every plan reflects what's actually happening in the business.
Automate & integrate Pigment & Workday REST
Use case
Real-Time Headcount Planning Sync
Whenever an employee record is created or updated in Workday — new hires, transfers, terminations — tray.ai automatically pushes that change into the corresponding Pigment headcount model. Finance teams no longer wait for weekly HR exports to update their workforce plans. Every open role, filled seat, and departure appears in Pigment as soon as it happens in Workday.
Use case
Compensation and Salary Data Integration for Cost Modeling
Salary bands, compensation changes, and bonus structures stored in Workday can be automatically synced into Pigment to feed compensation cost models and scenario plans. When a merit increase cycle or equity refresh runs in Workday, tray.ai moves the relevant data into Pigment so total compensation budgets stay aligned with actuals. FP&A teams get more precise people-cost models without manual data pulls.
Use case
Organizational Hierarchy Mapping for Departmental Budgeting
Workday is the authoritative source of truth for your org hierarchy — cost centers, departments, management chains, and reporting structures. tray.ai extracts this hierarchy data from Workday REST and maps it into Pigment's planning dimensions, so budgets, forecasts, and actuals stay aligned to the current org structure. Department name changes and cost center realignments flow through automatically.
Use case
Attrition and Turnover Scenario Modeling
By pulling Workday termination events and historical attrition data into Pigment, FP&A teams can build dynamic attrition models that update automatically as employee churn is recorded. tray.ai monitors Workday for termination events and feeds them into Pigment's forecasting layer, so teams can run scenario analysis on voluntary and involuntary turnover, backfill timelines, and recruiting costs.
Use case
Benefits and Burden Rate Calculations
Employee benefits costs — healthcare, retirement contributions, payroll taxes — stored in Workday can be automatically fed into Pigment to keep burden rate calculations current. tray.ai routes benefits enrollment and cost data from Workday REST into the right Pigment model inputs, so fully loaded headcount costs always reflect the latest benefits elections and employer contribution rates.
Use case
Workforce Capacity Planning for Revenue and Ops Teams
Revenue and operations leaders using Pigment for capacity planning need current workforce data to model sales coverage, support staffing ratios, and delivery team capacity. tray.ai pulls active employee counts, role types, and start dates from Workday and surfaces them in Pigment, giving GTM and ops leaders a reliable foundation for quota-setting, territory planning, and delivery forecasting.
Use case
Month-End Close Headcount Reporting Automation
At month-end, finance teams need a frozen snapshot of headcount, open roles, and labor costs for reporting and variance analysis. tray.ai automates the extraction of period-end employee data from Workday REST and loads it directly into Pigment's actuals layer, cutting the manual close process and reducing the risk of mismatched figures between HR reports and the financial model.
Get started with Pigment & Workday REST integration today
Pigment & Workday REST Challenges
What challenges are there when working with Pigment & Workday REST and how will using Tray.ai help?
Challenge
Mapping Workday's Complex Data Model to Pigment's Planning Dimensions
Workday REST returns deeply nested employee and org data structures with Workday-specific identifiers that don't naturally match the dimension labels and hierarchy formats Pigment expects. Writing and maintaining transformation logic to bridge these two schemas is time-consuming and brittle, particularly as org structures evolve.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai provides a visual data transformation layer that lets teams map Workday's nested JSON structures to Pigment's flat or hierarchical dimension formats without writing custom code. When org structures change, mappings can be updated in minutes through the visual interface, and tray.ai's built-in error handling flags any unmapped fields before they corrupt planning data.
Challenge
Handling Effective-Dated Changes and Retroactive Workday Updates
Workday is built around effective-dated records, meaning compensation changes, transfers, and org moves often carry past or future effective dates rather than aligning with when the API event fires. Syncing these changes into Pigment without respecting effective dates can corrupt historical actuals or prematurely update future forecast periods.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai workflows inspect the effective date field on each Workday record and apply conditional logic to determine whether the change should update historical actuals, current period data, or future forecast lines in Pigment. The correct planning period gets updated based on when the change is meant to take effect, preserving the integrity of your financial model.
Challenge
Managing High-Volume Employee Data Refreshes Without Hitting API Rate Limits
Large enterprise organizations may have tens of thousands of employees in Workday. Running full headcount refreshes against the Workday REST API in a naive loop can quickly exhaust API rate limits, cause timeout errors, and leave Pigment with partial or inconsistent data loads — particularly during month-end close when reliability matters most.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai handles pagination, request throttling, and retry logic natively within its workflow engine, so large Workday data sets are extracted incrementally without breaching rate limits. Workflows can be configured to process changes in batches and pick up from failure points, so you get complete, consistent data loads into Pigment every time.
Challenge
Keeping Pigment Planning Models Consistent During Workday Org Restructures
Major org restructures in Workday — cost center consolidations, department splits, management hierarchy changes — can invalidate existing Pigment planning dimensions and knock budget allocations out of sync. Without automated dimension management, finance teams must manually audit and remap every affected model, a process that can take days during a significant reorg.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai detects structural changes in Workday's organizational data and automatically reconciles them against Pigment's dimension hierarchy, creating new dimensions, deprecating old ones, and remapping budget lines to the updated structure. Any changes that need a human decision trigger an alert to finance operations, which cuts the manual effort required to keep Pigment models current during a reorg.
Challenge
Ensuring Data Security and Compliance Across HR and Finance Systems
Employee compensation, benefits, and personal data flowing between Workday and Pigment is among the most sensitive information in any organization. Only authorized fields should be transferred, data must be encrypted in transit, and the integration needs to comply with internal data governance policies and regulations like GDPR — all of which require careful design and ongoing oversight.
How Tray.ai Can Help:
tray.ai is SOC 2 Type II certified and encrypts all data in transit via TLS. Granular access controls let administrators define exactly which fields get extracted from Workday and written to Pigment, and field-level filtering can anonymize or drop personally identifiable information where it isn't needed for planning purposes. Compliance is built into how the integration works, not bolted on afterward.
Start using our pre-built Pigment & Workday REST templates today
Start from scratch or use one of our pre-built Pigment & Workday REST templates to quickly solve your most common use cases.
Pigment & Workday REST Templates
Find pre-built Pigment & Workday REST solutions for common use cases
Template
New Hire Auto-Sync from Workday to Pigment Headcount Model
This template monitors Workday REST for new employee creation events and automatically updates the headcount planning model in Pigment with the new hire's department, role, start date, compensation, and cost center. Approved headcount shows up in financial plans immediately, no manual data entry required.
Steps:
- Trigger on new employee hire event detected via Workday REST API
- Extract employee attributes including name, department, cost center, role, start date, and base salary
- Map Workday employee fields to corresponding Pigment planning dimensions and metrics
- Write new headcount record to Pigment model via Pigment API
- Log sync result and send confirmation notification to FP&A Slack channel
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment
Template
Workday Org Hierarchy to Pigment Dimension Sync
This template periodically extracts the full organizational hierarchy from Workday REST — departments, cost centers, and management reporting lines — and syncs them into Pigment's planning dimensions to keep budget structures aligned with actual org design.
Steps:
- Schedule nightly trigger to initiate org hierarchy extraction from Workday REST
- Pull all active cost centers, departments, and org unit hierarchies from Workday
- Compare extracted hierarchy against current Pigment dimension structure to identify changes
- Create, update, or deactivate dimensions in Pigment to match the current Workday structure
- Send summary change log to finance operations team via email
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment
Template
Workday Termination Event to Pigment Headcount Reduction Workflow
When an employee termination is recorded in Workday, this template automatically updates the Pigment headcount model to reflect the departure, adjusts forward-looking cost forecasts, and flags the open backfill in the relevant planning model for finance and HR review.
Steps:
- Trigger on employee termination event captured via Workday REST webhook or polling
- Retrieve terminated employee record including department, role, cost center, and termination date
- Update Pigment headcount model to mark position as vacated as of the termination effective date
- Recalculate downstream salary and burden cost forecasts in Pigment affected by the departure
- Create a backfill flag or open role entry in Pigment for FP&A and HRBP review
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment
Template
Monthly Headcount Snapshot Load from Workday to Pigment Actuals
At the end of each month, this template automatically pulls a complete snapshot of active employee counts and labor costs by department from Workday REST and loads them into the Pigment actuals layer, enabling fast and accurate budget-versus-actual variance reporting.
Steps:
- Trigger on last business day of each month via scheduled workflow
- Query Workday REST for full active headcount, salaries, and benefits costs segmented by cost center
- Transform and map Workday data fields to Pigment actuals data model schema
- Load period-end headcount actuals into Pigment for the closed month
- Notify finance close team that actuals have been loaded and are ready for variance review
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment
Template
Compensation Change Propagation from Workday to Pigment Forecast
This template detects compensation changes in Workday — merit increases, promotions, role changes — and automatically updates the relevant employee cost lines in Pigment's forward-looking salary forecast, keeping compensation budgets aligned with approved pay changes.
Steps:
- Trigger on compensation change event in Workday REST, including merit, promotion, and adjustment types
- Extract updated employee compensation details including new base salary and effective date
- Identify the corresponding employee record and cost line in Pigment's compensation model
- Update forward salary forecast in Pigment from the effective date of the compensation change
- Log change for audit trail and alert FP&A manager to review updated forecast impact
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment
Template
Workday Workforce Data to Pigment Capacity Planning Model Refresh
This template syncs active headcount by team, role type, and geography from Workday into Pigment's capacity planning models on a recurring basis, so sales, customer success, and delivery teams are building plans on current workforce data.
Steps:
- Schedule weekly trigger to initiate workforce data refresh
- Pull active employees segmented by role, team, manager, and geography from Workday REST
- Aggregate headcount metrics by planning segment relevant to Pigment capacity model
- Update capacity inputs in Pigment model with refreshed workforce counts and role breakdowns
- Generate a capacity vs. plan gap summary and distribute to operations and finance leads
Connectors Used: Workday REST, Pigment