Print A -  A -  A

Resources

OneRF Logo 

OneRF is the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RFCUNY)’s initiative to unify and evolve our finance, grants management, procurement, and human resources systems.

Launch Dates

The OneRF brand launched in October 2025 and access to OneRF, including the Workday platform, will be available on the following dates:

  • December 15, 2025: RFCUNY human resources processes including payroll and timekeeping will be available on the OneRF system, powered by Workday.
  • January 5, 2026: RFCUNY grants and contracts; procurement; and finance processes will be available on the OneRF system.

OneRF will launch with embedded, step-by-step job aids to support the most important functions necessary to do your job. RFCUNY will continue to publish additional information on this page and via email, including more details on the launch, what’s changing, and what you can expect in terms of practical, focused training.

What This Means

OneRF will be powered by Workday, a best-in-class, cloud-based Human Capital Management and Financial Management system. We anticipate that OneRF will bring greater transparency, real-time data, and streamlined administrative processing overall. We expect that this, in turn, will allow CUNY faculty to focus more time on research and less time on administrative processing. OneRF will make these changes guided by four principles:

  1. Standardization: OneRF will integrate and evolve human resources, grants administration, procurement, and financial processes in one system for the first time. This unification will improve user experience, customer service, and reporting by allowing you to perform many important tasks through one easy-to-use portal.
  2. Efficiency: Through the Workday platform, OneRF will automate many processes that are currently manual. For example,   new main page in Workday will feature automatic notifications and a personalized to-do list, reducing administrative burden, minimizing redundancies, and delivering accurate, easy-to-understand information.
  3. User Friendliness: OneRF’s Workday system will have many user-centric, self-service features, improving workflows and increasing the timeliness of information available. The system’s robust search engine allows users to rapidly find and access the information and processes they need, while the unified menu and global navigation will bring an intuitive structure.
  4. Transparency: OneRF will reduce complexity and give greater on-demand insight into our processes, including real-time activity and expenditure tracking. OneRF will provide numerous on-demand and customizable reports to allow you to see exactly what needs to happen and what actions you need to take.

At launch, RFCUNY will provide detailed, step-by-step job aids embedded directly within many of the most common functions of the OneRF platform. By following these job aids, you will be able to continue to perform your necessary operations.

It is important to note that OneRF will evolve the Research Foundation (RFCUNY’s) finance, grants management, procurement, and human resources systems. CUNY is undertaking a separate Workday implementation, called CUNYWork, which is scheduled to go live in January 2027 and is focused on the systems at the City University of New York and its campuses.

What Researchers Can Do to Prepare

RFCUNY’s staff are hard at work to make the launch of OneRF as smooth as possible. We will be providing more detailed information on our cutover process in the coming weeks. In the meantime, researchers can prepare today by submitting all outstanding P-Card transactions. Please note the following deadlines:

You can and need to prepare now.  Many of RFCUNY’s systems and many processes related to grants and contracts, procurement, finances, and human resources will be updating and changing but our existing systems are still available. 

In order to help you prepare and act early, we have developed and published more detailed information related to the OneRF transition – also known as the cutover process.  It’s important to note that, in addition to the deadlines, some processes will also have a brief blackout window in late December when we will ask that you hold transactions until they can be input into the new system.   

By submitting your transactions, requests, and documents well in advance of the deadlines above, you will ensure that RFCUNY has ample time to smoothly process them and address any issues that may arise. 

Why We Are Making this Change Now

RFCUNY is constantly seeking to align our processes with current best practices, as we work to improve and evolve our systems that serve the CUNY community. We are using Workday to power OneRF because it is an industry-leading, best-in-class solution. Additionally, RFCUNY is working now to implement OneRF because many of the systems we currently use for finance, grants management, procurement, and human resources are approaching sunset, while modern, cloud-based systems offer greater efficiency and customer support. Concurrently, vendors that provide some of the services we use are reducing or ending their support. In response, RFCUNY worked throughout 2024 and 2025 to identify a new vendor for these services and selected Workday as the platform that will power OneRF.

When fully implemented, OneRF will modernize and unite our systems by providing standardized, efficient, and transparent processes that will benefit CUNY faculty, Principal Investigators, Grants Officers, and RFCUNY staff. OneRF’s new software will streamline processes like grant management and administration, recruitment and hiring, and financial management. The user-friendly interface will also offer one platform that provides real-time information to users equally well on mobile devices and large monitors.

Learn More

What’s Next

RFCUNY will continue to send regular communications on OneRF via email. On this page, we will also publish additional information, including frequently asked questions, further details on the launch, what’s changing, and what you can expect in terms of practical, focused training.

Communication Archive

Return to top