Integrating Workday with third-party payroll systems is crucial for organizations that use Workday HCM but rely on external payroll providers globally. Workday provides Cloud Connect for Third-Party Payroll, a set of pre-built integration frameworks to securely send HR data changes to and receive payroll results from external payroll systems. Two key Workday integration methods in this context are PICOF (Payroll Integration Common Output File) and PECI (Payroll Effective Change Interface). PICOF and PECI serve as the outbound interfaces from Workday to payroll vendors and together with inbound result integrations they enable a full end-to-end payroll data flow.
This article provides a brief primer on these integration approaches and how a Workday consultant can design an end-to-end payroll integration using PICOF/PECI from sending employee data changes to pulling back payroll results.