Five Workday Extend Apps You Can Build in Your Personal Developer Tenant

With a free personal developer account from the Workday Open Developer Program and its included Development tenant, you can build, deploy, and proxy-test complete, multi-persona Workday Extend applications—such as New Hire Equipment & Access, Conflict-of-Interest Disclosures, Remote Work Arrangement Requests, Peer Recognition, and Tuition Reimbursement—without needing a company Workday Extend subscription. Each of these five blueprints exercises the core architecture that enterprise clients actually pay for: Custom Business Objects (CBOs), live Workday Query Language (WQL) reads against worker and manager hierarchies, business process routing, role-scoped security, and multi-persona testing with Start Proxy.

Until recently, learning Workday Extend or building a portfolio of working apps was impossible unless your employer already held an enterprise Extend subscription and handed you a Development tenant. Now, as covered in our getting started guide for the Workday Open Developer Program, anyone can create a free personal developer account at developer.workday.com and request a Development tenant populated with staged sample data. (Just remember Workday's seven-day inactivity rule: sign in or run authenticated API activity at least once a week so your tenant does not expire.)

Once your tenant is ready, the hardest question is what to build after "Hello World." A single form that writes a text string to a table will not teach you how Extend works in the real world—and it will not impress a hiring manager or a prospective client.

Real enterprise Extend apps involve at least three distinct personas (usually an Employee, their Manager, and a functional group like IT, HR, or Compliance) and a complete status lifecycle, including what happens when a manager sends a request back for correction. Here are five realistic, portfolio-ready Extend apps you can build and test in your personal developer tenant today—several of which you can watch built and tested from start to finish on What it does.

At a Glance: The Five Extend Blueprints

1. New Hire Equipment & Access

Before a new starter's first day, equipment, software, and building access requests often get split across emails and spreadsheets. Managers cannot see everything that was requested, and IT has to chase missing details.

How to Architect It in Extend

• What It Stores (CBO): A request record holding the requester, recipient, manager, start date, business reason, selected hardware/software/access items, manager decision and comment, and individual item progress and completion notes.
• What It Reads from Workday (WQL): The signed-in worker, their direct reports (so a manager can initiate for a direct report), and the recipient's actual manager.
• Who Sees What: Employees see their own requests (My Requests) and can correct and resubmit a returned request with the manager's comment displayed right beside the form. Managers see Team Requests for their direct reports and can approve or return with a comment. Authorized IT staff open a protected New Hire IT Fulfilment queue, filter approved requests by status or start date, and mark each item complete with notes until the overall request becomes Ready.

You can inspect the screens and watch the full 36-minute build and multi-persona acceptance run for New Hire Equipment & Access on What it does.

2. Conflict-of-Interest Disclosures

Healthcare systems, financial institutions, and public companies require employees to disclose outside board seats, financial interests, family relationships with vendors, or secondary employment—and have those disclosures reviewed before an audit deadline.

How to Architect It in Extend

• What It Stores (CBO): Disclosure category (Outside Employment, Vendor Relationship, Financial Interest, Gift), entity name, financial value tier, mitigation plan, employee attestation timestamp, reviewer comments, and compliance determination (Cleared, Mitigation Required, Returned).
• What It Reads from Workday (WQL): The worker's supervisory organization, job profile, and management hierarchy so disclosures can route to the manager (or the manager's manager) and then to the Compliance team.
• What to Test with Start Proxy: Test submitting a disclosure with no conflict (No Conflicts to Declare) versus an active vendor conflict. Verify that a peer employee cannot read a colleague's disclosure, that the manager can record a review note, and that Compliance can filter pending disclosures across the enterprise. Watch our home page film to see kiweely build and promote a conflict-of-interest app from a policy document.

3. Remote Work Arrangement Requests

When remote or hybrid work is agreed to informally over email, managers apply policy inconsistently and HR cannot answer a basic payroll-tax compliance question: who is working from which state or country?

How to Architect It in Extend

• What It Stores (CBO): Employee, arrangement type (Fully Remote or Hybrid), start date, remote work address (city, state/region, country), office weekdays (required only when Hybrid is chosen), reason, and the approving manager.
• Business Process & Routing: A Workday business process routes each request to the employee's own manager, who approves it or sends it back with a comment. Sent-back requests land in the employee's tasks to be corrected and resubmitted.
• HR Visibility: Only approved arrangements appear on HR's company-wide page, where HR can narrow the list by country or state. Watch the 13-minute film of Remote Work Arrangement on What it does.

4. Peer Recognition with a Quarterly Point Allowance

Recognition programs fail when thanks are buried in chat channels and quarterly point budgets are tracked by hand in a spreadsheet.

How to Architect It in Extend

• What It Stores (CBO): Sender (always bound to the signed-in worker so nobody can spoof a thank-you on someone else's behalf), recipient colleague, company value (Caring, Teamwork, or Excellence), message, optional points (0, 10, 25, or 50), date, and fiscal quarter.
• Allowance Logic: Give each employee 100 points per quarter. The home page calculates remaining points dynamically from the employee's posted recognitions in the current quarter and prevents submissions that exceed the remaining balance. Once posted, recognitions are immutable.
• Role-Scoped Views: Employees see recognitions they received (Recognitions I Received). Managers see a feed of recognitions received by their current direct reports (My Team's Recognitions). HR Administrators see the entire company's recognitions with aggregate totals of recognitions and points broken down by company value. Watch Peer Recognition built and tested across 18 functional checks on What it does.

5. Tuition Reimbursement & Continuing Education

Tuition reimbursement is a classic two-phase lifecycle problem: an employee asks for budget pre-approval before the semester starts, and then comes back three months later to upload their final grade and receipt to trigger reimbursement.

How to Architect It in Extend

• What It Stores (CBO): Course title, institution, degree/certificate program, term dates, requested amount, annual cap tracking, pre-approval status, completion grade, receipt details, and final payout approval status.
• What It Reads from Workday (WQL): The worker's hireDate and continuous service date (to enforce a policy such as requiring 6 or 12 months of tenure before eligibility), plus their cost center and manager.
• What to Test with Start Proxy: Proxy as a newly hired employee with less than 6 months of service to confirm the eligibility guard blocks submission with a clear message. Then proxy as an eligible employee, have their manager pre-approve the course, proxy back as the employee to submit course completion details, and verify that Benefits/Payroll sees the approved reimbursement ready for payout.

Build and Test All Five for Free in kiweely

You can build these apps by hand in App Builder and the Developer CLI—or you can connect your Workday personal developer account to kiweely and watch an AI agent build, validate, deploy, and test them in your Development tenant.

Kiweely Personal is free for your Workday personal developer account and its tenant. Any other tenant needs a Personal licence, $99 a month, or a seat in your firm. Every new kiweely account starts with $5 of Kiweely Credits (no AI account or card needed), or you can connect your own ChatGPT or Claude plan. Describe any of the five blueprints above, attach your own policy rules, and watch kiweely build the app, have Workday check every version, deploy it to your Development tenant on your yes, and test it with Start Proxy as the employee, manager, and admin.