A Complete Guide to Maintaining Quicklinks in Workday for Easy Navigation

 Workday has a lot going on. Between dashboards, reports, tasks, and apps, navigating to the same handful of pages dozens of times a day gets old fast. Quicklinks exist precisely to solve that problem — they let users pin the pages they actually use so they're reachable in two clicks instead of six.

But Quicklinks only work if they're set up well and maintained over time. Here's a practical guide to doing both.

What Quicklinks are (and what they're not)

Quicklinks in Workday are personalized shortcuts that appear in the Navigation menu. Each user can add their own based on the tasks they perform most frequently — a manager might pin their team's time approval page, while a finance analyst might pin a specific report. They're user-level, not system-wide, which means they require individual setup but also give each person exactly the access pattern they need.

They're not the same as saved searches or recently visited pages. Quicklinks are deliberate — you add them intentionally and they stay until you remove them.

How to add a Quicklink

The process is straightforward once you know where to look:

Navigate to the page you want to add — a task, report, dashboard, or worklet. Once you're there, click the star icon or "Add to Quicklinks" option that appears in the page header or action menu. The link immediately appears in your Navigation panel under the Quicklinks section. If you can't find the option, try accessing the page from the search bar and using the bookmark icon that appears in the search result.

Not every page in Workday supports Quicklinks — some task flows and drill-through reports can't be pinned directly. For those, the workaround is bookmarking the parent page where you can reach the task from one click.

Organizing your Quicklinks effectively

Adding everything you use creates a list that's just as hard to navigate as the original menu. A few principles help keep it useful:

Limit to genuinely frequent tasks. If you access something once a week, it probably doesn't need a Quicklink — the search bar handles occasional lookups fine. Reserve Quicklinks for daily or multiple-times-daily pages. Group by workflow mentally. If you're frequently approving time, running headcount reports, and checking open requisitions, those three deserve Quicklinks. The expense report you file monthly doesn't.

Name them clearly if renaming is available. Some Workday configurations allow custom names for Quicklinks. If yours does, use descriptive names rather than the default system label. "Q3 Headcount Report" is more useful than "Custom Report 4479." Choosing the right HR platform in the first place affects how navigable these systems become — platforms that support user-level customization make Quicklinks genuinely useful rather than a cosmetic feature.

Maintaining Quicklinks over time

Quicklinks go stale. Reports get replaced, processes change, pages get reorganized. A Quicklink that points to a deprecated page either breaks entirely or lands somewhere unexpected. Set a personal reminder — quarterly works for most people — to review your Quicklinks list and remove anything that's no longer current.

After major Workday updates or tenant configuration changes, it's worth checking your Quicklinks right away. System updates sometimes reorganize navigation or rename pages, and links that worked before may behave differently after. Time tracking and payroll integrations in Workday often involve the pages people pin most frequently — keeping those links maintained avoids daily friction.

Quicklinks for teams: what admins should know

Workday Quicklinks are user-managed, but admins can support good habits through training and documentation. A few things worth doing at the system level:

Include Quicklink setup in onboarding documentation. New users don't know what they'll access frequently until they've been using the system for a few weeks, so a follow-up resource after the first month works better than a day-one tutorial. Create role-based recommended Quicklinks. You can't push Quicklinks to users automatically, but you can publish a reference guide showing the five pages each role should pin. Most users will appreciate the direction.

Consider navigation in your configuration decisions. When adding new pages or restructuring menus, think about where users are likely to Quicklink from. Burying an important report three levels deep is fine if users can Quicklink to it — but make sure the path to the first visit is also clear. HRIS selection guides for different organization types often underweight navigation and usability in favor of feature lists — ease of daily access matters just as much in practice.

Common issues and how to fix them

A Quicklink that doesn't work is usually one of three things: the underlying page was retired or renamed, your access permissions changed, or the Quicklink was added from a filtered or search-specific view that no longer resolves correctly.

To fix a broken link, remove it and re-navigate to the page directly. If the page still exists and you have access, re-add it from there. If the page is gone, find the replacement and add that instead. If you've lost access, you'll need to request the appropriate role or security group from your HR or IT team. Modern HR platforms use AI to streamline workflow access — the same principle applies to keeping navigation useful as your role evolves.

The bottom line on Quicklinks

Quicklinks are a small feature with a meaningful impact on how usable Workday feels day-to-day. They don't require configuration from IT, they're reversible, and they take about thirty seconds to set up. The payoff — shaving navigation time from routine tasks — compounds quickly for people who live in the system.

Set them up intentionally, keep them clean, and review them when the system changes. That's really all there is to it.

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