Two years into Workday and most HRIS teams have a vague sense that there are gaps. People are working around them in odd places. A spreadsheet here, a Google Form there, a manager who keeps a paper checklist for new hires. None of this looks like a "Workday Extend opportunity" until you go looking for it specifically. When you do, the candidate list tends to be much longer than expected, and the first few use cases pay for the platform several times over.
Six categories cover most of what we see in practice. Each one has a recognisable pattern. None of them are exotic. The hardest part of any of these conversations is getting the team to admit how long they have lived with the broken version.
1. Manual processes living in spreadsheets and inboxes
Every spreadsheet your operations team relies on is a signal. If a manager maintains a tracker, an analyst reconciles two systems weekly, or a process runs on an email thread, you have an Extend candidate. The work is already being done. It just lives outside Workday.
A typical example. A procurement team runs supplier purchase order requests through Google Docs and shared spreadsheets, with reconciliation delays and visibility gaps. An Extend app pulls the request inside Workday, automates the approval routing, and connects the result directly to financial accruals. The benefit is not just the time saved by procurement staff. It is the elimination of the lag between approval and accounting recognition. The kind of process that nobody asked Workday to fix because nobody framed it as a Workday problem.
If you ask any operations lead what they do in Excel that should really live in Workday, the answer usually arrives in under thirty seconds. That conversation is the cheapest source of candidates for this category.
2. Unique workflows and approvals Workday cannot configure
Workday's delivered business processes handle 80 to 90 percent of typical organisational workflows. The remaining 10 to 20 percent is where things get specific to your operating model, your geography, or your industry. If you find yourself bending a Workday business process beyond recognition, you are probably building the wrong thing the wrong way.
A common pattern: a high-stakes payout process that requires multi-step approvals, integration with external systems that hold the underlying data, and tight controls because the recipients notice immediately when payment is late or wrong. No standard Workday approval covers it. An Extend app handles the workflow cleanly, pulls in the external data feed, and routes the result back into Workday Financials. The team stops running the process in a shared inbox.
Look for the processes where your team has accepted a clunky workaround because "Workday cannot do that". Half the time, the better question is "could we build that in Extend?"
3. Self-service gaps that generate support tickets
Whenever an employee or manager has to email HR or IT to do something they would expect to do themselves, you have a self-service gap. Each ticket costs time on both sides, and the people raising them are usually the ones with the least patience for waiting.
Two recurring examples. A labour-billing app that lets managers handle billing directly inside Workday, removing the step that previously routed through finance. A mileage calculator that uses a maps API to compute distance and submit a reimbursement claim, all in one Workday transaction, replacing the dance between an external mileage tool and a separate expense submission. Each one removes a recurring source of friction. Each one is small. Together they are why the support inbox shrinks.
Ticket volume is where these candidates surface most cleanly. A month of HR or IT support tickets bucketed by topic shows you where the friction sits, and the largest buckets are usually self-service gaps. A few of them are Extend apps waiting to be built.
4. Compliance and data quality processes Workday does not natively track
Most industries have data they need to capture that Workday's delivered fields do not cover. Certifications. Internal audits. Specific licences for regulated roles. If you are tracking this in a separate system or, worse, in a folder of PDFs in SharePoint, the audit risk grows quietly until something goes wrong.
Extend lets you build a structured, secure record of this data inside Workday, with the same access controls and reporting as your core HR data. The benefit is rarely speed. It is the confidence that the record is complete, current, and defensible in an audit.
Your compliance officer usually has a private list of what is making her nervous this year. Half of it is probably an Extend candidate, and she will hand you the list cleanly if you ask.
5. High-volume processes where standard Workday is fast enough, but not fast enough
Workday's standard processes are designed for accuracy and control, which sometimes makes them slower than you need at very high volume. Retail hiring peaks, mass onboarding for project-based industries, large salary rounds, and bulk contingent worker setup are the obvious cases.
A common pattern: a mass-processing Extend app that handles a hundred contingent workers at a time in a single grid, with validation rules and downstream Workday business processes still respected. The difference is one screen for the user instead of one hundred. The downstream data quality is the same.
This category is easy to spot. Look at any process that runs more than 50 times a week, then watch the team doing it. If they are clicking through the same screens hundreds of times, an Extend grid app will repay the build cost within a year.
6. Country-specific or industry-specific requirements
Workday's localisation is broad but not infinite. Specific countries, sectors, and regulatory regimes have requirements the delivered product covers thinly or not at all. Statutory reporting in certain Asian markets. Industry-specific record-keeping for healthcare, finance, or higher education. Local labour processes in several European countries where co-determination law requires structured employee or works council consultation on certain HR decisions.
These are the use cases where Extend earns its keep most cleanly. A country-specific consultation workflow built once in Extend gives the team a defensible, auditable process that survives audit and works for the people actually running it. The local requirement does not go away. Building the right answer once is cheaper than maintaining the workaround forever.
If your team has "we cannot do that in Workday because of [country/regulation/industry]" written into a runbook somewhere, that is an Extend candidate. The local requirement will not go away. The workaround will only get more expensive.
“The use cases that pay back fastest are the ones your team has already accepted as broken.”
How to actually surface the list inside your organisation
Six categories sound tidy on a page. The real work is getting the list out of people's heads and onto paper. Five tactics that have worked for clients we have helped.
Talk to the business directly. Sit with HR business partners, payroll specialists, finance analysts, and ask one question: "What do you wish Workday could do that it cannot?" Most of them have an answer ready. Some have several.
Scan support tickets and change requests. The recurring complaints are not annoyances, they are data. Group them by theme and you have a prioritised list with frequency attached.
Look at the systems you might retire. Old satellite systems, license renewals due in the next eighteen months, tools that run on a single person's knowledge. Replacing them with an Extend app retires recurring cost and consolidates the data inside Workday.
Audit shadow IT. Quietly. Without judgement. Access databases, Google Forms, SharePoint lists used as operational tools. Each one was created because Workday did not cover something, and someone decided to fix it. They have already done the requirements work for you.
Browse Workday's own Extend app templates and the marketplace. Not to copy, but to spark recognition. "We do something like that, only worse" is a useful reaction to have.
A short qualifying checklist before you commit
Four questions for each candidate. Does it eliminate manual work, reduce risk, or reduce cost in a way you can describe with a number? Is there genuinely no Built on Workday or native Workday solution that would do it for less effort? Does it support a real business goal someone in leadership cares about? And, the question that catches half the bad ideas: is there a named stakeholder who will champion this, or just a vague sense that "it would be nice"?
If the answer to the last question is "vague", park the idea. Champion-less Extend apps tend to be the ones that ship late, get adopted slowly, and lose support after the first release.
