Production go-live: September 19, 2026

Preview window: August 15 – September 19 (open now)

Release notes published: August 7, 2026

Verify all items against your organization's official "What's New in Workday" report in the Workday Community — feature lists vary by the modules and SKUs you own. Based on Workday’s official What’s New report (pulled September 4, 2026): 343 items in 2026R2, of which 125 touch finance functional areas. Exact impact varies by the modules and SKUs you own — filter the report in your own tenant.

What's in 2026R2 for finance — from Workday's official What's New report

• Close & consolidation: tolerance-based and ambiguous transaction matching; import reconciling items and supporting balances from external matching systems; copy prior-period supporting balances; high-volume reconciliation grids; run auto-certification for any period.
• Financial accounting: new Recurring Journal Template business process; multicompany/multicurrency journals from recurring templates; option to block currency-rate overrides on journals; Withholding Tax Work Area; tax declaration versioning and scheduled runs; automated VAT netting; multiple funding source statuses and grant worktags on default funding sources.
• Banking & settlement: approval workflow for settlement-run cancellations; auto-cancel of empty scheduled runs; personal bank account masking on entry; pending Bank Connectivity payments report; normalized balance reporting across banks; Kyriba external payment group IDs for reconciliation.
• Payroll accounting (delivered): corrective accounting for retroactive pay; reallocation extended to fringe; a new cutoff date to block reallocations into closed periods; award-costs processing for reallocations (grants).
• Receivables / revenue: collections action cards in the Customer Accounts Hub; cancel write-offs during payment reversal; tax recovery on invoice write-offs; faster customer creation with duplicate alerts; formula-based standalone selling prices for revenue allocation; a new Revenue Contract Agent (AI) that extracts contract data into Workday.
• Payables / procurement: payment schedules for supplier invoices (installments); OCR document classification and zero-line handling for supplier invoices; Quick Receipts self-service task; scheduled receipts for PO lines; granular Supplier Portal security.
• Expenses: split expense lines across worktags; multi-destination mileage; expanded OCR receipt fields; AI-generated-receipt risk scoring in Expense Protect.
• Planning & analytics: Workday for Google Sheets add-on; Adaptive Planning MCP Server for customer AI agents; Prism custom business views for Financials; new Business View for Project Cost.
• Assets: bulk SOAP APIs for project asset capitalization and assignment.

1 — Before testing (this week)

Pull your tenant's What's New report from Workday Community, filtered to owned modules Split every item into delivered (automatic — must regression-test) vs opt-in (decision required) Assign a named owner per functional area (R2R, Banking, P2P, C2C, Expenses, Projects, Reporting, Integrations) Confirm preview tenant access for every tester; schedule testing around the close calendar Watch the 2026R2 Feature Release Review webinar recordings (available to all customers since Aug 31)

2 — Regression testing (highest blast radius first)

Close cycle end-to-end: journal workflows, intercompany, allocations, period-close checklist in Record to Report Banking & Settlement: settlement runs, bank reconciliation, payment integrations; verify bank account masking changes don't break statements or recon Payroll posting to GL: run a payroll accounting test given the reallocation/retro changes in this release Top 20 reports leadership actually uses: validate results against production, not just execution Financial integrations: payroll posting, procurement connectors, expense feeds, bank files Custom business process steps and condition rules in any finance BP you've tailored C2C if live: collections worklists, write-offs, customer creation, invoice output New UI readiness: have finance users run their daily tasks in the new interface; note training gaps

3 — Opt-in decisions

For each opt-in feature: test with real scenarios, then enable with evidence or defer with a documented reason Evaluate AI/Illuminate agent opportunities — and honestly assess whether your FDM/worktag hygiene is ready for them Log every decision (including deferrals) in a release log so next release starts from a record, not memory

4 — Go-live weekend and after (Sept 19+)

Monitor Workday's release-weekend communications Monday after: re-verify the critical path — close tasks, payments, payroll posting, key reports Triage user-reported issues against the release notes before assuming configuration bugs Schedule adoption of deferred opt-ins you approved — value not enabled is value not received