What's New in Workday 2026R2 for Project Billing and Resourcing

If you run Workday PSA, one release note in 2026R2 outweighs the other nine combined. Workday is splitting the resource plan line into two separate objects: a resource request for tracking demand, and a resource assignment for tracking who actually fills it. Everything else in this release (a handful of billing and prepaid updates) is worth ten minutes of your attention. This one is worth an afternoon with your business process definitions.

The release lands in every production tenant on September 19. Here's what changes, what else shipped, and what to test before then.

Resource Requests and Assignments Split Demand From Delivery

Today, a single resource plan line carries both the staffing need and the person filling it. That works until you need to backfill a role mid-project, split one request across two part-time workers, or track a vacancy separately from an assignment. Workday now gives you a Resource Request and Assignment tab that separates the two, so demand (the role, the allocation, the requirements) lives independently from the workers assigned against it.

A few specifics worth knowing before you flip this on:

• The new Project Resource Request business process controls approval of demand. The existing Project Resource Plan Line process now governs assignments only. If you're on Services CPQ and have approval steps on the legacy Resource Plan Line subprocess, they do not carry over. You have to recreate them on the new process by hand.
• A new tenant setting, Allow Multiple Resources for a Single Assignment, ships enabled by default to preserve current behavior. If you're adopting the new model, disable it. A one-to-one relationship between assignment and worker is what makes the reporting clean.
• Reporting moves with it: a new Project Resource Requests data source, a Quoted Project Resource Request object for baselining original demand, and four new web service operations (Get/Submit Project Resource Requests, Get/Submit Project Resource Assignments). The old Resource Plan Line report field still works but is scheduled for retirement, so point new custom reports at the new field now instead of building on something Workday has already flagged for removal.

None of this is optional cleanup. It's a genuine architecture change to how demand and delivery are modeled, and it touches security, business process definitions, and integrations at the same time.

Five More Changes Worth a Look

• Invoice narrative dynamic tags: Narrative templates can now pull report fields, custom fields, and calculated fields automatically instead of relying on manual copy and paste. A new report field, Total Customer Invoice Narrative Amount, lets you validate that narrative totals actually match the invoice
• Closed prepaid installments: You can now import legacy prepaid balances in Closed status through the Submit Billing Schedule web service (v47.0+), preserving historical consumption instead of starting every migrated contract at a clean balance
• Tax on prepaid drawdowns: A new Apply Prepaid Balance to Taxes option lets a single prepaid balance cover both the service amount and its tax. It only works cleanly when the prepaid line itself has no tax applicability and the consumption lines do; mixed setups fall back to the old behavior with no tax drawn down
• Custom references on billable transactions: The Billable Transactions REST API now exposes five custom reference fields on ad hoc project transactions, so you can keep reference data synced with upstream systems without hand-editing invoices later
• Self-updating resource pools: Resource pool membership can now sync nightly from an Audience Builder query instead of manual maintenance, though it needs a dedicated Integration System User to run

Where Teams Get Tripped Up

• Assuming the split is a UI change. It's a data model change. Existing reports built on the old Resource Plan Line field keep working, but new ones can't use it, and Workday has already flagged it for future retirement.
• Leaving CPQ approvals on the old subprocess. Quote-driven resource requests route through the new Project Resource Request process now. Approval steps you had on Resource Plan Line don't move automatically. Nobody notices until an unapproved request slips through.
• Skipping the prepaid tax setup check. If any prepaid contract line on a consolidated schedule has tax applicability set differently from its consumption lines, the whole schedule reverts to no tax drawdown, and it fails quietly rather than throwing an error.
• Testing resourcing changes in isolation from Projects security. 2026R2 also tightens role-based access for project hierarchies. If your resource pool or request approvers relied on hierarchy-level roles rather than project-level assignment, they may lose access at the same time you're reconfiguring resourcing. Test both together.

The One Thing to Do This Week

Before production on September 19, pull your Services CPQ approval configuration and confirm which steps live on the old Resource Plan Line subprocess. That's the change most likely to bite, and it's the one nobody remembers until a quote closes with no approval history behind it.

Working through the resource request and assignment migration? Let's talk.

Curious what else changed? Check our blog on 2026R2 changes in Billing and Customer Accounts.