Reporting is a core function of the Workday enterprise management platform that gives lead decision makers vital insights into their operational data.
Through its continuous innovation, Workday provides businesses in a variety of industries the means to make strategic, data-driven decisions with confidence. Reporting is one of its core functions, in which the platform transforms historical and current data into actionable insights, which team leaders can use to optimise their operations. For example, a manager might use custom reporting to display things like employee compensation summaries that allow analysts to drill down into the finer details.
What are Workday Reports?
Workday provides reports that can be adjusted to fulfil the individual needs of specific teams, such as HR or finance. Department managers and key decision makers can view a list of all reports delivered by the platform and organise them by function, description, or report type.
Workday reports broadly fall into two main categories:
Workday Standard Reports are reports that are readily available in the system. Standard reports tagged as Report Writer can be copied and customised to produce a new custom report.
Workday Custom reports are reports that were created based on specific requirements to produce meaningful data for users.
The most frequently used report types in Workday are Simple, Advanced, Matrix, and Composite. Here’s an overview of how they work:
- Simple reports have limited features. They only allow filtering and sorting.
- Advanced reports expand these functionalities, such as building prompts and enabling sharing with specific group and/or users.
- Matrix reports are like a “pivot” functionality in excel and allow users to drill down into data, group and summarize it. This report type is ideal to use in Dashboards as worklets.
- Composite reports enable the combination of multiple reports to produce a single report. This report type is useful for performing more complex calculations.
While it is recommended to use Workday delivered fields in building a report to consider the report performance, a calculated field is valuable in many instances. Common use cases include evaluating a condition, getting a date difference, formatting text, pulling up values from other Business Object, performing arithmetic calculations, and many more.
Sharing and Exporting Reports
Workday reports often contain confidential proprietary information, such as corporate financial data. By default, a custom report is only visible to the report owner. A report can only be shared with the authorized users. It is important to understand that sharing a report with other users/groups does not mean same level of visibility. Report output depends on the security setup for every user or group. Report data is controlled and secured on a granular level, which means that the content that’s visible in the report varies depending on who’s accessing it.
What are the best reporting practices?
Workday provides a range of reporting features such as Scheduling of Reports, Alerts, Worklets and Dashboard, Workday Slides, Worksheets, Discovery Boards, and Document Automation (letter generation as an example). Security and confidentiality are baked in by design to ensure easy access to operational data without adding risk. That said, there are still certain best practices that report admins should follow, such as:
- Avoid creating test reports in a production tenant. Use a lower tenant if you want to test certain features and functions.
- Use the tagging function for data classification and easier searching. For example, you can tag reports by their function and user role, such as HR, Finance, or Support.
- Define consistent tags and naming standards for custom reports and calculated fields that are relevant and understandable to their target user groups.
- Share reports only with relevant security groups and/or users, and be sure to proactively delete your personal reports if you no longer need them.
Both standard and custom reporting are among the central functions that Workday provides, and understanding how to implement them is vital for the optimisation of day-to-day business operations. However, as with everything that involves working with sensitive data, it’s also vital that end users follow the best practices for keeping their reports secure and ensuring that they are only shared with people who have the necessary permissions.
Ultimately, to ensure security when sharing your reports, it’s always best to follow the principle of least privilege. This means handling report outputs with high confidentiality and only sharing them with users and user groups on a need-to-know basis.
Coreteam helps enterprises get more out of their Workday deployments with tailored success plans and dependable guidance. Contact us today to start transforming your business.
