What is a Workday Report Writer?
Workday Report Writer is a powerful tool within the Workday Application designed to create custom reports. It serves as an integral component of Workday’s suite, enabling businesses and HR professionals to extract, organize, and analyze data across various domains such as human resources, finance, payroll, and more.
Before diving deeper report we should know the key concepts below.
- Business Object: Workday is using object-oriented model and it stores data in a business object. The business object contains fields and instances. Workday delivers many business objects to access data from Workday. In terms of the relational database concept, it can be considered as a Table, and in Excel it can be considered as a worksheet. example: Worker, Position, Job profile ..etc Note: workday business object is linked from one BO to other you can see relationship with business object details tasks.
- Data Source: Each Business Object is associated with one or more Data Sources, which can be thought of as the windows through which you view the data stored in these objects. In terms of relational database concept data source is considered as view.
- Report Data Source: it is a general data data source. All Active and Terminated Worker
- Indexed Data Source: Workday provides index data source and index data source is optimized for performance and can be utilized as part of report field as aggression, filter or facet filter ..etc. Index data source also has limitation, if you are creating a report with index data source then you can only apply filter on index fields(sometimes this might be challenging and it will meet client requirements) . Examples of index data sources is Worker for HCM Reporting, Indexed Worker, Journal Line.
- Type Of Fields in Workday: On business object and data source you can see field with below type
- Self-referencing – This is self-reference of primary business Object
- Single Instance – One to One relationship with object. example: Manager level 01 is 1:1 relationship with worker
- Multi-instance: mesna one to many relationships with object. example: Workday can have multiple position or dependent so dependent field on worker is as multi-instance.
- Currency
- Boolean – it holds value true false or yes or No
- Date – example Hire Date, etc
- Text
- Numeric
Type of Report in Workday:
Standard Report: These reports are delivered by Workday and maintained by them and the reports are available for all clients. Standard reports can be two types Report Writer and Xpresso. You can copy standard report writer into a custom report but you can not copy XpressO into a custom report.
Custom Report: Workday provides the capability to create your report from scratch to meet the business requirements. Any custom report developed by the client remains exclusive to their instance and is not shared with other clients. A custom report is created using Workday report writer functionality.
Custom Report Types:
- Simple Report
This type of report is designed for generating reports to quickly overview data. It allows the use of fields from the primary business object. Generally, this report is simple to create, but it may not be very useful if you require data from related business objects. - Advance Report
This report type is very powerful and it enables the creation of complex custom reports tailored to client business needs. It incorporates fields from related business objects (BOs), supports advanced filtering, utilizes calculated fields, offers options for prompting fields, and facilitates sharing reports with business users. Additionally, advanced reports can be configured for RaaS (Reporting as a Service) to facilitate integration. - Matrix Report:
This report type is the foundation of analytics and allows us to get summarized view of data based on one or more fields. Data to this report can presented as a table to in chart. This report also provides capability of further drilling down and apply facet filter to get more data insight of summarized view. - Composite Report:
This report type provides the capability to combine data based on multiple reports which means you can use multiple business objects. Matrix reports serve a purpose as a sub-report. It provides a similar capability to a matrix report plus you can use composite reports to do further calculations based on data from different matrix reports. - Search Report:
This report type allows the user to simply search through report results and apply additional facet filters. This report requires you to configure the result header as well as the fields that should show underneath it. Finding internal jobs is an excellent example from this report type. - nBox Report:
This report type counts data and displays results in 2 dimensional matrix. - Transpose Report:
This report is similar to the advance report but in this report type you can interchange rows and columns. example: Column name will appear as rows and respective value will appear as col. This report also allows you to group fields as it is relevant to users. It is not best for many report results as it will be difficult to analyze data. This report is great to be used as part of employee profiles. - Trending Report:
This report is similar to the matrix report but with the time element. this report is commonly used for analysing data based on for given period. One of example of this report could be to analyze the turnover rate month by month.