Built for Workday customers

You bought Workday for control.
So why the spreadsheet?

Most Workday customers still track real headcount in a side spreadsheet because Finance, HR, and Recruiting never quite agree. TeamOhana closes that gap and works on top of Workday, not instead of it.

Run the 5-minute Workday health check Read the reality check ebook
TeamOhana · Authorization layer
Live
Approved
812
Open to recruit
340
Frozen
62
Filled
388
Bi-directional sync
W
Workday · System of record
HCM
Workers
1,602
Positions
2,180
Payroll
Owned
The pattern

Workday Position Management was the right choice. It just wasn't the whole answer.

Roughly 80% of Workday customers turn on Position Management because they need real control over headcount. The intent is right. But across hundreds of public threads from HRIS, Finance, and Recruiting teams, the story is the same.

Workday tells you a position exists. It can't tell you whether that role is actually approved, funded, and safe to hire, with everyone agreeing. That gap is where the cleanup, the mismatched numbers, and the spreadsheets live.

80%
of Workday HCM customers use Position Management
9
recurring failure patterns documented in public operator forums
6mo
typical lag before headcount variance shows up in the P&L
0
systems of record TeamOhana replaces
THE PAIN YOUR STAFF IS FEELING

If any of this sounds like your week, you're not alone.

Every quote below is from a real Workday customer on a public operator forum. The pattern is identical across industries, company sizes, and Workday tenure.

HRIS Admin
"Most of my ticket queue is position-related. Stale positions never closed, duplicates from managers who didn't know one existed, security tied to positions that shouldn't exist anymore. It's a full-time job."
— r/workday
Finance / FP&A
"FP&A maintains the headcount plan in Adaptive. Workday holds the positions. They never match. Reconciliation is a monthly project that consumes a full analyst's time."
— r/workday
Finance
"Headcount cost variance hits the P&L six months after the decisions that caused it. The control should have been at the approval, not the reconciliation."
— r/FPandA
Talent / Recruiting
"Workday positions don't tell me if I should actually open this req. The position is technically there, but I can't tell if Finance has authorized it or if it's still pending budget review."
— r/workday
Hiring Manager
"I'm a manager. Why is opening a role so complicated? I have approved headcount in my budget. I just want to post the job. Why do I need to understand the difference between a position and a requisition?"
— r/workday
CEO / Board view
"Our CEO asks 'how many approved but unfilled roles do we have?' and we spend two days reconciling before answering. The investment in Workday was supposed to solve this."
— r/workday
Read the full operator survey report
The structural reason

This isn't a Workday failure. It's a missing layer.

Workday is excellent at what it was built for: the durable record of who works here and what positions exist. That should stay in Workday.

But "is this role approved to hire, funded, and agreed on by everyone?" is a different question, and the answer has to line up across four places at once: Workday, your recruiting system, your finance plan, and your budget. Workday was never built to keep all four in sync.

So teams patch it themselves. HRIS lives in cleanup mode. Finance builds its own tracker. Recruiting opens a role and learns three weeks later it got frozen. The same position means one thing to Finance, another to HR, another to Recruiting, and nobody can reconcile them.

The fix isn't more Workday configuration. It's one shared layer above Workday that keeps everyone on the same number.

Diagram: Workday, ATS, FP&A, and Plan all flow into a central Authorization State hub
HOW TEAMOHANA CAN HELP

One shared answer to "is this role real?"

One place that shows whether a role is approved, funded, and safe to hire, shared across Workday, your recruiting system, your finance plan, and your managers. Live, role-based, and audit-ready.

One clean list of roles

A clean state machine — planned → authorized → open to recruit → frozen → filled — that lives above Workday. Bad state can't enter the system. Stale positions, duplicate backfills, and frozen roles still recruiting all get caught before they become a ticket.

HRIS stops being the cleanup crew.

Approvals that check the budget

Every position request is checked against the active plan in real time. Approvers see budget impact at the moment of the decision, not six months later at the variance review. Comp band drift inside open reqs surfaces immediately.

Catch the overspend at approval, not six months later.

One number everyone trusts

Workday holds the position. The ATS holds the req. FP&A holds the plan. TeamOhana holds the cross-system meaning that says they all agree. When the CEO asks "how many approved but unfilled roles do we have?" there is one answer, not three.

One number everyone trusts.

Reality Check · No. 01
The Workday Admin's field guide.
TeamOhana May 2026
For HRIS leads & Workday admins

You are not failing. The architecture is.

A practical assessment of Workday Position Management at scale — written for the people who keep it running. The nine failure modes, the cleanup math, and what a Monday looks like after the gap is closed.

Audience
HRIS · Workday admins
Format
Web · ~35 min read
Includes
Implementation worksheet
Open the field guide
No form. No gate. Built for the people on the keyboard.
For the buying coalition

One tool. Finance, HR, and Recruiting finally on the same page.

For the
CFO / VP Finance
Pain

"Headcount is 70–80% of our operating budget. Workday holds the positions, Finance holds the plan, and they never agree."

Promise

One authoritative view of approved and filled headcount, tied directly to your financial plans. Variance prevention at the approval, not the reconciliation.

Proof

Real-time budget impact on every position request. Adaptive and Pigment coexistence by design.

Read the CFO cost memo
For the
CHRO / Head of People
Pain

"My credibility depends on the numbers matching Finance. They don't. HRIS is in permanent cleanup mode and I get blamed for data we don't actually own."

Promise

A clean, trustworthy organizational seat map without drowning HRIS in cleanup. Finance and HR finally share the same authorization record — and the same number.

Proof

Cleanup ticket volume reduction. Position drift detection. HRIS bandwidth recovered for strategic work.

Read the CHRO strategy brief
For the
Head of Talent
Pain

"I open a req based on a Workday position and I can't tell if Finance has actually authorized it. Recruiters lose trust in the requisition list."

Promise

No more chasing approvals or discovering too late that a req isn't funded. Clear status: approved to hire, pending Finance, frozen. One-click from approved headcount to open req.

Proof

No re-entering data that already lives in Workday. Slack notifications on state changes. ATS keeps owning recruiting workflow.

Read the TA leader's playbook
Field guide · 2026 edition

The Workday Position Management Reality Check.

One argument across eight chapters and two appendices: why Position Management exists, the five failure modes, the hidden cost stack, the front-door architecture, and the implementation worksheet you can hand to your team on Monday. ~45 minutes, end-to-end.

Read the field guide
The coexistence boundary

Workday stays your system of record. We sit on top.

The clearest way to understand TeamOhana is to see what we deliberately don't own. Workday is the HRIS. We don't touch payroll, time, benefits, or worker master data. We live above the system of record, not inside it.

Domain
W
Workday
TeamOhana
Worker master data
System of record
Reference only, never owner
Position records
System of record for position attributes
Orchestrate lifecycle; overlay authorization state
Is this role approved?
Partial (status flags only)
Own unified cross-system authorization object
Budget connection
Reference cost centers
Own link between budget lines and positions
Approval workflows
Local Workday business processes
Budget-aware approvals across systems, with audit trail
Payroll, time, benefits
Full owner
No ownership, read-only where needed

"Workday remains your system of record for employees and positions. TeamOhana sits above Workday and owns the authorization state, the cross-system meaning that Position Management alone cannot enforce."

What changes after deployment

What actually changes after you turn it on.

Reconciliation hours reduced

Replaces

Monthly Finance vs HR headcount reconciliation projects

Cleanup tickets down

Replaces

HRIS queue dominated by stale, duplicate, and orphaned positions

Variance surfaced at approval

Replaces

Headcount cost variance discovered six months late

Single answer to "how many approved heads?"

Replaces

Two-day reconciliation drills before every board meeting

Customer story

SeatGeek eliminated operational chaos, saving 23 hours weekly and avoiding $200k+ in overspend, by unifying Workday, Greenhouse, and headcount planning.

Read the full story
WHAT WE HEAR MOST

Three questions Workday customers always ask.

We just spent two years implementing Workday. Are you asking us to rip and replace?+

No. We coexist with Workday by design. Workday stays your system of record for workers and positions. We add the authorization layer above it. Most customers go live in 6 weeks without changing a single Workday configuration.

Why can't Workday just do this with better business process configuration?+

Workday's BP framework is powerful but it lives inside one system. The authorization problem is cross-system: it spans Workday, your ATS, your FP&A tool, and your plan. No matter how richly you configure Workday BPs, they can't enforce meaning in systems Workday doesn't own. That's a structural limit, not a configuration gap.

Does this become another system my HRIS team has to maintain?+

No. TeamOhana is a layer, not another tenant to administer. There are no business processes to author, no security roles to migrate, no integrations to hand-build. We connect to Workday, your ATS, and your FP&A tool through pre-built integrations in 6 to 8 weeks. Across our customer base, HRIS time on TeamOhana after go-live averages under 2 hours per week, and that's mostly people asking questions, not configuration work.

Take the next step

Find out what the gap is costing you.

If any of those quotes sounded like your team, the gap is already costing you in cleanup hours, late surprises in the budget, and time spent reconciling numbers that should already agree. The question is how much.

5 minutes · self-serve

Workday Position Management Health Check

A self-serve scorecard that surfaces the specific failure patterns showing up in your environment, scored against the nine documented operator failure modes. You get the result. No demo required.

Start the health check
30 minutes · live demo

See TeamOhana in action

A live walkthrough of TeamOhana running above a real Workday tenant, with your CFO, Head of Talent, and HRIS lead in the room. 

Schedule time with an expert

Workforce decisions. Finally authorized.