Workday's merit process

We were recently reviewing some setup in our test Workday tenant, done by our consultants.  As a large, global company we have everyone on a year end merit process, with increases effective as of January 1st.  In order to accomplish this process, we need to start in Sept/Oct, as there are various approval chains and roll-up reporting.  As well, we then need to deliver files to payroll systems in time for them to process these updates too.

The consultants were suprised that we start this process prior to January 1.  As well, WD appears to want you to only think about merits AFTER the period has closed...so in our case, as of January 1.  When you are running the various processes within WD and automatically selecting your employees, we seem to be running the risk that someone terminating in November will get caught up in the process in WD and we cannot get them out of the pool.  (As opposed to our current process where they will get manually removed when it's still in Excel or excluded via PSoft functionality). 

In WD it's not smart enough to exclude them along the way, but instead the manager will need to allocate a 0% increase to the person.  It's not the end of the world, but the functionality could do with being a little more flexible as to how companies have structured these processes.  My guess is that we are one of WD's largest customers so it's the first time they are seeing such large-scale processes.  Smaller companies surely have a more lean and nimble timescale when having fewer employees to process and maybe do more things closer in to the actual effective date.