PECI vs PICOF
Firstly we need to know the two common terms most frequently being referred in Payroll integrations
PICOF abbrevates to Payroll Integration Common Output File. (Pronounced as PeCOFF)
PECI abbrevates to Payroll Effective Change Interface. (Pronounced as Peechy)
WECI abbrevates to Worker Effective Change Interface. (Pronounced as Weechy)
PICOF:
PICOF is currently an end-of-life product as referred by workday which means it will no longer comes with additional enhancements or changes or features to the integration system. It does not support Effective dating / Sequence of records to represent all effective changes but provides you with the top of the stack row. Can only scan future dated transactions for worker status changes configured. Corrections and Rescinds are not well handled and there is a HTML report that is generated. In PICOF Full Extract can be indicated using an integration attribute or the Full Diff service and launch parameter.
PECI:
The entire focus is shifted to PECI now. PECI vs PICOF will be driven according to how the data is expected by your payroll provider. Workday recommends to use PECI for Payroll interface integrations.
PECI supports Effective dating / Sequence of records to represent all worker effective changes. PECI can scan up-to additional 2 pay periods of all kinds of worker changes, PECI connectors give more effective detailed data. PECI connector gives ability to scan for all effective changes even in future pay periods. PECI allows you to add field overrides for most of the relevant sections that e.g. allows you to handle additional fields for multiple positions correctly. PECI enables you to handle special events like termination rescind, hire rescind, corrections in a proper way, as it outputs them with the special event codes.
PECI integration template is what workday certified third party payroll providers use to get data from Workday. This is being constantly improved and new features are being added on a regular basis. It can run up to 50 pay groups per one instance. If you have more than that, you can categorize the PECI by region based to keep the limit of pay groups per instance to less than 50.
In PECI Full Extract is indicated using a launch parameter. PECI is simplified to use less attribute configuration in comparison with PICOF. You can run PECI in Full Snapshot (launch parameter), this will give you ALL current data not just changes only.
Corrections and Rescinds especially for Hire, Term and some Leave events are better handled with unique event codes in the xml. You have additional control of reporting the transactions from the pay groups and recently Workday added new functionality to track Last Date Extracted at worker level
PECI has the limitation of handling only 150,000 worker records. As this is quite a new solution when it comes to Workday Connectors having some minor glitches, but still it's one of the most powerful connectors currently available in Workday.
Effective Stack change detection in PECI allows you to capture all the changes between the two integration runs with the corresponding effective and entry date vs one snapshot per Employee in PICOF where there is a risk of data loss in case if there were multiple changes to the same piece of data between 2 integration runs
If you are just trying to use change detection logic that PECI uses, you can also use Worker Change Effective Interface template. Both these integration templates use workday DIS Service to produce effective changes. Also, the tenant has to be Grid Enabled by Workday if you plan to use PECI or WECI..
