🌞🏗 Your guide to custom BP notifications in Workday

Read time: 10 minutes

Honestly… we can’t believe how much knowledge is packed into today’s newsletter 🤯

So buckle up, and welcome to part 2 of your BP notification guide! 🚀

Last week, you learned about system BP notifications and their surprising customizability (ICYMI, you can catch up on part 1 here).

This week, as promised, you’ll learn the ins and outs of custom BP notification setup.

Here’s a quick look at our agenda from last week…

By the end of today’s newsletter, you’ll configure your custom BP notifications with confidence and clarity.

So get ready to wave buh-bye 👋 to that “am I doing this right?” feeling…

And let’s get into it!

Create your custom notification…

🚨 Remember to complete your configuration in a test environment first!

To create your new custom BP notification, navigate to your BP definition, click on the related actions button, hover over “Business Process”, and click “Add Notification”.

Some important custom notification housekeeping…

To copy, delete, or edit your custom notification, navigate to the “Notifications” tab on your BP definition. Click on the related actions button in the “Notification” column of the notification you want to take action on, hover over “Business Process”, and select your action of choice:

When you’re creating multiple custom notifications, the “Copy Notification” function is especially helpful! With this function, you can create a copy of an existing custom notification, and tweak settings as needed. This saves you a lot of time and effort when you need to create variations of similar notifications (e.g., different recipients, triggers, delays, etc.).

Apply a design template to your custom notification 🎨

Once you create your custom notification, the first input you see is Override Email Template.

When you click into this dropdown, the available options come from these 2 places:

1️⃣ Legacy Email Templates enabled for the usage of “Business Process Email”.

AND

2️⃣ Notification Templates enabled for “Custom Business Process Notifications”.

If no options are available to select, neither 1 nor 2 are enabled.

By default, Workday applies the Email Template set to both Active and Default within the “Maintain Email Templates” task to your notification…

If you don’t have an Email Template set to Active and Default, and you leave the Override Email Template input blank, no template is applied to your notification.

👉 For more details on enabling Email and Notification Templates for custom BP notifications, click here (it’s a 3-minute read!).

Anddd… if you want to upgrade your template setup knowledge, check out our Well Built guides on Email Templates for Alerts and Notification Designer.

☑️ Do Not Include Notification Details Link…

Below the Override Email Template input, notice there’s a check box labeled, “Do Not Include Notification Details Link”.

By default, Workday has this unchecked. This setting controls whether a “Click here to view the notification details” link is included within the notification.

Well, when you send a custom notification to a recipient who doesn’t have a Workday account (like a candidate or an email address), it doesn’t make sense to include this link.

Simply check the “Do Not Include Notification Details Links” box ☑️ to remove this link from your notification…

And note… if you configure an SMS notification, by default Workday doesn’t include the link in the SMS message, regardless of if you check this box or not.

When will your notification send? ⏰

Enter, your next input: Triggers.

Triggers determine WHEN your notification will be sent out. Workday’s trigger options provide a ton of customizability.

Your 4 overarching trigger options are…

1️⃣ Trigger on Status - You can send your notification when the BP is Canceled, Completed, Corrected, Denied, Manually Advanced, and/or Rescinded.

2️⃣ On Entry - You can send your notification upon the entry of any 1 selected BP step.

3️⃣ On Exit - You can send your notification upon the exit of any 1 selected BP step.

4️⃣ On Ad Hoc Approval - You can send your notification upon the completion of an Ad Hoc Approval for your Review and Approval BP steps. Note that this option is only available if Ad Hoc Approve permissions are configured on the BP’s security policy.

For the Job Application BP within the Recruiting module, you have another trigger option…

▶️ On Disposition - With this setting, you can trigger notifications based on disposition reasons. For example, you could notify a hiring manager when a candidate is rejected due to consideration for another role.

Lastly, here’s one nuance to note regarding notification triggers…

If you configure a custom notification on the exit of the initiation step of a subprocess included within another BP, the notification won’t trigger until the entire subprocess completes 👎

For this reason, when you configure notifications on BPs that can be subprocesses, you should trigger the notification upon entry of the step after initiation instead 👍

Add a delay to your notification…

As of 2024R1, the timing of your notification doesn’t end at triggers. Optionally, you can also configure a delay based on either your trigger moment, or a selected field (for example, Hire Date, Effective Date, etc.).

Add your desired delay in the “Calculated Date” input. Note that delayed notifications typically send out around an hour or two after midnight once the Calculated Date time period has passed—timing isn’t precise!

Under what circumstances will your notification fire? 🤔

To the left of Triggers, you’ll see Conditions and Rules…

If you’re familiar with condition rules on BP steps, condition rules on notifications function similarly. When you place one or more condition rules on your notification, the notification will fire only if all conditions are met.

You can get as creative as you need to here, as long as the fields within your condition are on a BP-related business object (BO), such as Event, Action Event, etc. If needed, you can pull fields from other BOs with LRV and LVAD calculated fields.

A common condition for a custom notification is Initiator is not Worker. You can use this condition to notify employees about business processes initiated on their behalf…

To create a new condition for your notification, click on your notification’s related actions button, hover over “Business Process”, and click “Create Condition Rule”…

To add a condition to a notification, edit the notification, and click the “+” button within the Conditions and Rules table to add a row.

Note that the process of creating then adding a condition rule to your notification is a bit clunky—open a separate tab for each task to speed up your workflow!

👉 If you want to learn the ins and outs of condition rule setup, check out our boolean condition config guide.

Repeat On 🔁

Under the Delay Notification section, you’ll see Repeat On. If your organization doesn’t use Workday Financials, feel welcome to skip ahead!

The use cases for the optional Repeat On settings are limited, but helpful if your organization uses Financials functionality such as customer invoicing.

This setting is used for events that email PDF documents, such as the Customer Invoice Email Event, Customer Statement Event, or Purchase Order Issue Event BPs.

When you add a field to the “Related Instances” input, Workday generates separate notifications for every instance of that field. For example, consider the Customer Invoice Email Event BP; the setting below sends a separate notification for each unique customer invoice to be emailed within the BP event, rather than for the overarching BP event itself…

Most of the time, you’ll leave this section blank—but hopefully you’ll sleep easier now that you know what this setting is for 😜

Who will you notify?

Your next set of inputs is an important one—Recipients. That is, who should receive this notification?

In the “Recipients” input, you can add any field that exists on an event-related BO (e.g., Awaiting Persons, Worker, etc.).

In the “Groups” input, you can add any security role related to the BP event (e.g., Manager, Employee As Self, HR Partner, etc.).

You’ll typically populate Recipients or Groups—not both. However, within each input, you can select multiple fields (for example, you can send your notification to your HR Partners, HR Admins, and Benefits Admins at the same time).

You can also send a custom notification directly to an email address. This can be used to send notifications to shared inboxes or third-parties…

Your last input within the Recipients section is “Email Option”…

Email Option determines which email address type (e.g., home, work) the notification is sent to for your Recipients / Groups. The “Default” option uses work email if available, else home email for worker-based BPs, and business email for business-based BPs.

The meat of your notification 🥩

Alright! Finally, it’s time to configure your notification’s Message Content.

Similar to Alert setup, within the Subject and Body of your custom notification, you can add both text (including emojis 😆) and dynamic fields. The dynamic fields you use must live on BP event-based BOs. If you pull in BP-related data, test thoroughly to ensure the data is displayed correctly for your intended recipients.

Here’s a sample setup for a custom notification on the Preferred Name Change BP. This notification informs a worker when a preferred name change has been completed on their behalf (i.e., the worker did not initiate the change)…

And don’t forget—once your config is complete, press OK to save your work.

Notification Routing Rules…

To make sure your custom BP notifications get sent out as expected, run the task Edit Tenant Setup - Notifications. Scroll down to “Notification Delivery Settings”, and click on the “Business Processes” category.

Here, you can review your Notification Routing Rule settings for the Custom Business Process Notifications category…

Time to test! 💪

To kick off your comprehensive testing, first redirect email notifications to a test email or inbox. Then, initiate a BP event that hits your notification’s trigger scenario.

Here’s our fully configured example notification…

In this notification, upon completion of the preferred name change event (trigger), when the initiator is not the worker (condition), a notification is sent to the employee (group) notifying them of the change completed on their behalf (message content).

For our first test, we’ll initiate the BP as an HR Admin.

Anddd, drum roll please 🥁🥁🥁

Voila! Our first test was a success 👏 The notification triggered with our expected output, dynamic field and all.

When you test, document proof that all settings work properly. Don’t only test for positive results… test for negative results too (i.e., the notification should not fire when initiated by an employee).

If you need visibility into which notifications fired (and when), review the “All Events” tab on the BP event’s full process record…

Disabling your custom BP notifications…

Lastly, if you want to shut off your custom notification(s) without deleting them…

Use the “Maintain System Notifications” button on the Notification tab of your BP definition to disable all or some of your custom notifications.

WHEW! Ya made it! 🎉

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳 

Until next time!

Ceci & Mia

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions