A business process that the initiator has started. For example, the Hire Employee for Organization X business process definition becomes an instance when the initiator uses it to hire a particular applicant.

The set of tasks that need to be completed for an event to occur, the order in which they must be done, and who must do them. Workday includes a number of predefined business processes for different purposes. You can edit the default definitions for your organization. You can also create different versions of the same business process for different organizations.

Workday stores your data as business objects—organizations, workers, positions, and so on—which can be thought of as database tables or worksheets in Excel. Just as a database table or worksheet has columns and rows, a Workday business object has fields and instances. A business object is composed of a set of related fields, similar to how a table or spreadsheet is composed of a set of related columns.

You can assign positions to organization roles. Depending on your staffing model, a position may or may not necessarily have a worker specified.

Designated participants in a business process, with a defined responsibility in this type of event, indicate they approve the proposed action. (The business process can proceed to the next step.)

An aggregation security group is one whose members are other security groups. Workers associated with any included security group are granted access through an aggregation security group.

You can create 3 types of custom reports: simple, advanced, and matrix. An advanced report provides all the features of a simple report, plus more advanced ones such as accessing related business objects and producing multiple levels of headings and subtotals. Advanced reports also enable the use of sub-filters, run time prompts, charts, worklets, and report sharing, and provide the ability to expose the report as a web service.