At the beginning of the semester, student workers saw a change in how they logged hours for their jobs. Instead of submitting their timesheets physically or through a spreadsheet, they were now logging hours through a software called Workday.
Workday is a software that can help companies and organizations centralize their finances and payroll while keeping these aspects connected to human resources departments that oversee the company or organization
Trey Arrington, Chief Information Officer at Wofford, helped to start the transition to Workday when he started at Wofford a little over 2 years ago.
“The timecard piece was one piece of a huge transformation that the college needed to make, so the first phase of that is now done,” Arrington said.
Prior to workday, physical time cards, the size of index cards, were used by not only student workers, but also hourly employees. With these physical time cards, there was a need to get a physical signature for the time card to have the time worked be approved.
Excel spreadsheets were then used in an effort to start digitizing timecards, as well as other financial aspects of Wofford. Budgets and expense reports for the school were also done on excel, after years of being done by hand
By moving to Workday, there are less manual processes that are used in order to calculate and update the schools budget and expenses. Instead of manually doing these things, Workday now can update them live, such as adding a picture of a receipt and changing the expenses.
Courtney Dobbins, Director of Human Resources who came to Wofford a little under two years ago, also highlighted the benefits of the transition to Workday.
“It’s streamlined things so much more – it’s cutting down on errors, notifying students and other employees to submit timecards, and it’s automatic,” Dobbins said.
While making it easier to submit and sign off on time cards since it is online now, employees are now also able to submit requests for holiday pay and vacation time though Workday, and managers are able to approve it through the website.
Workday also cuts down on errors by automatically recognizing if a student worker or other employee of the school has been over or underpaid, and self adjusts their next pay to reflect the issue, making it an easier fix than having to go through the time cards by hand.
For some, though, the transition to Workday has been hard as they have had issues with learning a new technology, as well as some employees having a hard time with the new terminology, as english is not their first language.
While some employees have had issues adjusting to Workday, it has seemed to be an easy transition for student workers.
“From a student perspective, it has seemed to be pretty user friendly, you guys are very familiar with technology – I think it has been much easier of a process for students to work through with the time cards,” Dobbins said.
There was some worry about students being able to figure out how to enter time if they had more than one job, since they would have to select which job they are entering time for to send it for approval to the right manager. It has been a pleasant surprise that it has seemed to not be an issue.
“It’s going to be such a positive change, I’m connected to so many schools like Wofford that have gone full Workday, they’re completely live now, and just hearing some of the big wins they’ve had, I think it’s going to make some huge improvements for student lives” Arrington said.
The transition to Workday for timesheets and finances is only the first piece of the transition into Workday for Wofford. Soon, students will register for classes through the software.
Using Workday for registration should lead to less stressful registrations for students. The school is in the early stages of moving towards registration on Workday, but are aiming to have students in the Spring of 2026 register for their Fall 2026 classes on Workday.
