Workday has announced that over 350 new features make up its Spring release this year. This is the first time in recent memory that Workday has issued a press release for one of its bi-annual updates. The release has a wealth of improvements across its Finance and HCM solutions, many of which were based on customer suggestions.
Various partners and consulting firms have published their views on the update, and they include a wealth of detail around Workday 2025R2.
- Albida: Links to release notes for HCM and Finance
- Cognizant: Workday Release Preparation Guide
- Commit: Our Workday 2025 R1 Highlights
- HR Path: Links to videos explaining 9 new features in Workday 2025R1 (Registration required)
- Kainos: Workday Updates
- Opkey: Workday 2025R1 Release: What’s New?
- Preos: Get the Preos Guide to Workday 2025 R1. (Registration required)
- PWC: How Workday security history helps streamline audit and compliance
- Remy Corporation: Workday 2025R1 Update
- SuccessDay: Workday 2025R1 Release: Easier Absence Management with Automated Time Off Corrections
- Tietoevry: Webinar on Workday 2025R1 (Registration required)
Various customers have also issued information and videos explaining the changes to their users. Some of the above focus on a specific part or parts of the release, and others are a more comprehensive look at the 2025R1. The updates include AI innovations across Recruiting, Workforce Management, User Experience, and Finance.
David Somers, Chief Product Officer of Workday, commented, “Workday’s Spring 2025 release is directly shaped by feedback from our customers.
“We are delivering new features and solutions that simplify work, leverage AI to enhance and accelerate HR and finance processes, and empower our customers to focus on what matters most.”
Selection and Recruitment
Workday has included several improvements to the selection, recruitment and onboarding processes.
- AI-Powered Talent Rediscovery: Workday Recruiting now leverages AI to update each talent pool from across employees, past applicants, and talent pipelines in real-time. It means recruiters always access the most up to date information for people they should consider during the selection process.
- Personalised Preboarding and Onboarding Experiences: Organisations can now send personalised communications at different stages of the onboarding process. Content can be created and sent during pre-boarding after offers have been sent to ensure that candidates are engaged throughout the process. Once the candidate has signed on, they can be given a Workday account and communication can continue, helping them to complete onboarding tasks.
- Intelligent Job Recommendations: Not only will this release see AI used to identify jobs that match an employee’s experience, skills, interests, and career growth while following company rules for internal moves. The employee can now access any role, regardless of the language it was posted in. The multilingual search applies to the Job Description and the Job Posting Title on external career sites.
Workforce Management
Workday has also introduced several updates to Time and Attendance to help frontline workers within an organisation.
- Time Kiosk: A new Time Kiosk application enables the worker to clock in and clock out on a new iPad kiosk app. Managers are also able to correct invalid time clock events that workers record on the Workday Time Kiosk during downtime or on third-party clocks.
- Time Entry: Workday leverages AI to provide recommended time entries based on time type selections by users and the organisation’s historical time entries. The time entry system suggests times and durations that are typically entered to expedite time entry by users.
Helping users with Workday
Other improvements in HCM include a more intelligent search. Users can enter a search within Workday Assistant in natural language, and it will come back with the information they need whether that is relating to pay slips, time off, benefits, or something else. This feature will further lighten the burden on HR help desks, and the Workday AI can answer even more queries.
The release also sees the centralisation of Workday Guidance and Workday Help resources. It allows employees to create help tickets directly in their flow of work. Admins can also see reports to make sure the support they’re providing is helpful.
On the System Admin hub, administrators can now identify the most frequently used system tasks across Workday.
Finance in 2025R1
The release sees several improvements to the Finance and Projects.
Services CPQ
Workday has released Services CPQ as an additional feature for its Professional Services Automation (PSA) product suite. This is an additional module and allows organisations to manage their opportunity to cash workflows. It brings together the quoting system into the same platform as project management and finance, providing a central location for sales, services, and delivery.
Users can manage opportunities either in an external CRM solution, such as Salesforce or from within Workday. The platform includes templates and also automates the creation of new projects based on the quotes. Project creation includes resource forecasts and plans. It will also automate the creation of customer contracts, including billing schedules and revenue.
What isn’t clear is whether this CPQ solution is completely new or is the evolution of Zimit‘s software, the CPQ vendor that it announced it would acquire in 2021 and closed in 2022.
Accounts Payable enhancements
Workday has also simplified the invoice processing for Accounts Payable. AI will scan invoices and can help automate some of the tasks normally conducted by accounts staff. For instance, it will identify when purchase orders do not exist for purchase invoices, highlighting potential fraud.
Once matched, the AI can help automate approvals within certain spending limits. Overall, these new features reduce the manual workload, speed up processing and help AP teams focus on the days payable outstanding (DPO).
2025 R1 has also expanded the advanced settlement filtering for payment categories by enabling customers to select open intercompany transactions as well as on-cycle and off-cycle payroll payments in settlement runs using reporting capabilities.
Platform improvements
Customers and Partners will find it easier to create intelligent apps. AI Services are now available in the new Workday AI Gateway. Developers can use Workday APIs to build intelligent apps with Workday Extend Professional. Examples include:
- Data Query: Leverages AI to simplify the data query process in Workday by enabling users to search using natural language, which helps save time and reduce costs.
- Document Intelligence: Empowers users to extract important information from documents like supplier agreements, customer agreements, pay slips, and more.
Workday has also improved the security features of the platform. When you create or edit an accounting source and select a source system, Workday limits access to the accounting source based on the constrained Roles It has also enhanced security for credit card-related domains to provide greater control.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
2025 R1 is a substantial update by Workday, and there is a lot for customers to review with this release. Workday continues to embed AI across its platform. It is also adding new features and resolving some of the issues and requests highlighted by customers.
While some of the features will be available automatically, some need to be activated through configuration, mainly where the existing business process needs to change. Others, like Services CPQ, may have a price attached to them. Workday rarely makes pricing available for its solutions.
