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Human resources ⇄ Accounting and finance

Ceridian Dayforce to Workday integration — real-time, two-way sync

Keep Ceridian Dayforce and Workday in sync without custom scripts. Cut weeks of integration work, eliminate silent data drift, and give your team a single, reliable source of truth.

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Why teams connect Ceridian Dayforce and Workday

Keep the employee, department, and cost records that Workday and Ceridian Dayforce share consistent in real time, so the finance system and the people system stop drifting apart.

Workday runs the money side of the company: who gets paid, what it costs, and which part of the business the cost belongs to. Ceridian Dayforce runs the people side: who works here, which team they sit in, and how their employment changes over time. The two overlap on the same people and the same org structure, because every employee is also a payee and every department is also a cost center. When that overlap is maintained by hand, a new hire, a transfer, or a termination has to be keyed twice, and the two systems start to disagree about who is active and where the cost lands.

Stacksync syncs Workers, Organizations, Positions, Compensation in Workday with Employment Status, Work Assignments, Compensation Summary & Pay Adjustments, Employee Punches & Raw Clock Entries in Ceridian Dayforce bi-directionally and in real time. A person added, updated, or deactivated on either side appears on the other within seconds, with field-level mapping and conflict resolution in place of CSV exports and nightly batch jobs.

That matters most when money follows a people event. A hire that finance can pay, a leaver whose access ends, a transfer that redirects cost to the right team, all happen from one change instead of two, so headcount and spend reconcile from the same set of records.

Common use cases

  • 01 Sync worker records from Workday into IT and identity systems so hires, transfers, and terminations provision access automatically.
  • 02 Replicate worker, organization, and compensation data into a secured database for people analytics without giving analysts tenant access.
  • 03 Two-way sync of Employee and Work Assignment data (position, department, location, org unit) into Postgres so provisioning, internal apps, and analytics read current worker and org data in SQL while HR keeps editing in Dayforce.
  • 04 Push new hires (Employee, Employment Status, Work Assignment) from an ATS or onboarding tool into Dayforce with POST once a candidate is hired, pre-fetching valid XRefCodes for department, position, location, and pay group.

Common sync patterns

Status changes propagate

A role, department, or employment-status change in either system updates the other within seconds, so cost allocation, access, and reporting reflect the current state.

People-driven costs land in finance

Compensation, reimbursements, or other costs tied to a person on the Ceridian Dayforce side flow into Workday for posting, so the books reflect what people actually cost without manual re-entry.

New person becomes a known record in finance

When someone is added in Ceridian Dayforce, a matching employee or payee record appears in Workday, ready for payroll, expenses, or cost allocation without anyone rekeying the details.

What you can sync between Ceridian Dayforce and Workday

Representative objects on each side — any object or custom field can map to any target. Schemas are auto-detected; types are converted between the two systems.

Ceridian Dayforce objects Workday objects How this pairing syncs
Work Assignments Effective-dated position, department, location, and org-unit assignment; the most-synced record for org charts, provisioning, and analytics. Read and updatable via PATCH. Customers and Invoices Financials receivables objects synced for billing visibility where Workday Financials is used. Work Assignments is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Customers and Invoices to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Compensation Summary & Pay Adjustments Compensation Summary returns pay rate and frequency for reporting; Employee Pay Adjustments are written as effective-dated records via PATCH to post pay changes back to Dayforce. Journal Entries Accounting entries imported from external subledgers into Workday Financials. Compensation Summary & Pay Adjustments is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Journal Entries to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Employee Punches & Raw Clock Entries Time-and-attendance punches; raw clock entries are added with POST and punches removed with DELETE, so time data flows both ways between Dayforce and scheduling or workforce tools. Custom Reports (RaaS) Tenant-defined reports exposed as web service endpoints, often the practical read surface for syncs. Employee Punches & Raw Clock Entries is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Custom Reports (RaaS) to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Employee Schedules Shift and schedule assignments; created and updated through POST and PATCH schedule endpoints and paged with pageSize, used to push schedules from a WFM tool or pull them for analytics. Workers The central HCM record covering employment, job, and personal data; the anchor of most syncs. Employee Schedules is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Workers to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Org Units, Departments, Jobs & Positions Configuration reference data; POST creates org units and departments and PATCH updates job, position, department, and org-unit data. Used to resolve and validate XRefCodes when mapping employee writes. Organizations Supervisory and company hierarchies read to drive routing and reporting in other systems. Org Units, Departments, Jobs & Positions is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Organizations to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Time Away From Work & Balances Time-off requests and accrual balances read per employee; pulled into scheduling, payroll, or absence-reporting databases and used to reconcile leave against downstream systems. Positions Job seats synced with recruiting and planning tools. Time Away From Work & Balances is specific to Ceridian Dayforce and Positions to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.

How changes propagate between Ceridian Dayforce and Workday

Each direction of the sync is driven by what the source system can signal and what the destination accepts — detection, delivery, and expected latency below.

Ceridian Dayforce Workday Sub-second propagation

DetectionCeridian Dayforce notifies Stacksync of record changes through webhook events. No CDC stream.

DeliveryEach detected change is written to Workday through its API, with automatic retries and rate-limit backoff.

Workday Ceridian Dayforce Interval-based propagation

DetectionStacksync polls Workday for changes on an incremental schedule, reading only records changed since the previous pass. Polling, including transaction-log criteria on SOAP operations to fetch objects changed since a given moment.

DeliveryEach detected change is written to Ceridian Dayforce through its API, with automatic retries and rate-limit backoff.

Rate-limit considerations

  • Ceridian Dayforce: Dayforce does not publish numeric rate limits; thresholds vary by tenant and exceeding them returns HTTP 429, so large employee reads are paged (pageSize) and throttled with backoff. Employee list calls return XRefCodes only, so each employee needs a follow-up GET.
What ships with Ceridian Dayforce ⇄ Workday

Connect Ceridian Dayforce and Workday for flexible, real-time data sync.

Real-time sync, workflow automation, event queues, EDI, and monitoring, for every Ceridian Dayforce–Workday connection.

Real-time

Two-way sync

Changes in Ceridian Dayforce or Workday instantly reflect in both systems. No stale data, no manual imports.

No-code + pro-code

Workflow automation

Trigger automated workflows whenever Ceridian Dayforce or Workday data changes, update records, fire webhooks, or kick off sequences without brittle API scripts.

At scale

Event queues

Handle millions of events per minute without losing a single Ceridian Dayforce or Workday record.

Observability

Monitoring

Track your Ceridian Dayforce ⇄ Workday sync health, view errors, and replay failed events in one click.

Trading partners

EDI

Transform legacy EDI complexity into simple database interactions between Ceridian Dayforce and Workday.

How the Ceridian Dayforce and Workday connectors work

Ceridian Dayforce

Integration surface
REST API (Dayforce RESTful Web Services, v1/v2), JSON payloads
Authentication
HTTP Basic authentication with a dedicated Web Services user plus the client namespace (Company ID), or an OAuth 2.0 access token from the Dayforce identity endpoint (POST dfid.dayforcehcm.com/connect/token, client_id Dayforce.HCMAnywhere.Client). Token-based auth is recommended, and the Web Services role with the Read Data subfeature must be enabled on the account.
Change detection
No CDC stream. Broad change detection uses delta polling on GET Employees with filterUpdatedStartDate/filterUpdatedEndDate and filterUpdatedEntities to pull only records changed in a window. Dayforce also has native Event Notifications (the Notification Publisher) for lifecycle events — hire, rehire, terminate, and workflow validation — delivered by push to a receiver service or by querying unacknowledged notifications; the publisher runs roughly hourly and each notification must be acknowledged.
Capabilities
read · write · webhooks
Rate limits
Dayforce does not publish numeric rate limits; thresholds vary by tenant and exceeding them returns HTTP 429, so large employee reads are paged (pageSize) and throttled with backoff. Employee list calls return XRefCodes only, so each employee needs a follow-up GET.
Ceridian Dayforce setup guide

Workday

Integration surface
SOAP Workday Web Services (WWS), a REST API, and Reports-as-a-Service (RaaS) endpoints for custom reports
Authentication
OAuth 2.0 for the REST API; integration system users with WS-Security or certificate-based auth for SOAP
Change detection
Polling, including transaction-log criteria on SOAP operations to fetch objects changed since a given moment; no general webhook surface
Capabilities
read · write
How it works

How to connect Ceridian Dayforce to Workday — three steps, no code

Configure and sync within minutes, no code. Whether you sync 50k or 100M+ records, Stacksync handles the queues, infra, and plumbing. Integrations are non-invasive and need zero setup on your systems.

  1. 01

    Connect your apps

    Authenticate Ceridian Dayforce and Workday with each platform's native method — OAuth, API keys, or service accounts — plus secure options like SSH tunneling, IP whitelisting, and VPC peering.

    • OAuth 2.0
    • SSH tunnel
    • VPC peering
    Ceridian Dayforce connected
    Workday connected
    OAuth 2.0
    SSH tunnel
    SSL certificate
    VPC peering
  2. 02

    Choose tables

    Pick the Ceridian Dayforce and Workday objects to sync — Stacksync auto-detects both schemas, including custom fields where the platform exposes them. Sync to existing tables, or let Stacksync create new ones with ideal data types.

    • Standard objects
    • Custom objects
    • Auto-schema
    objects · Ceridian Dayforce ⇄ Workday
    Customers 12,480
    Sales Orders 8,213
    Invoices 5,902
    Items 1,344
  3. 03

    Map fields

    Fields map automatically even when names and types differ. Stacksync handles transformation and type casting for you, zero configuration required.

    • Auto-map
    • Type casting
    • Transforms
    Ceridian Dayforce Workday
    Company company_name text
    Email email text
    Amount amount numeric
    Created created_at timestamp
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FAQ

Ceridian Dayforce and Workday integration FAQ

SECURITY

Security teams trust Stacksync

As a data company, we understand the importance of keeping your data secure. Stacksync is built with security best practices to keep your data safe at every layer, and is DPF-certified for US, EU, UK and CH data transfers.

Learn more about security
SOC 2 Type II
ISO 27001
HIPAA BAA
GDPR
CCPA
DPF US-EU-UK-CH
→ SECURITY WITH BENEFITS

SSO & SCIM

Let your users access Stacksync from your centralized user management systems. Works with Okta, Azure, Google SSO and more.

Alerts

Immediately get alerted about record syncing issues over email, Slack, PagerDuty and WhatsApp. Resolve issues from a centralized dashboard with retry and revert options.

Secure connection options

Securely connects to your systems with:

OAuth 2 SSH Tunnelling SSL certificates IP Whitelisting VPN gateway VPC peering and more

Related integrations

Every pair below is a real-time, two-way sync. Search all 495 integrations available for Ceridian Dayforce and Workday.

Popular · 8 of 495
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