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Workday’s Report Fields and Values: the tool to find the data you need

Workday’s Report Fields and Values: the tool to find the data you need

My colleague recently wrote about one of Workday’s lifesaver features. I decided to compliment that with a favorite of my own: Report Fields and Values.

Back in 2014, I was one of the first ecosystem partners to get certified in Workday’s then fledgling recruiting product. It was raw and new, but as with everything in Workday, exciting to have such a rapidly improving and integrated function added to the Workday product line.

One of the challenges early on was a lack of report fields and direct relationships between business objects, making for some difficulty in creating condition rules, notifications, and custom reports. Often a field that could have been more closely associated with the Requisition Business Object was not, or sometimes the field I thought I needed on the Job Application business object was blank there, but had a value on the Candidate business object. It wasn’t uncommon to feel that I was searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Another recent requirement presented was to create a validation rule on the Change Job Business Process to prevent a user for inadvertently entering a salary plan with a different currency from the Grade Profile. Simple right? My colleague and I thought “We’ll just create a simple condition rule, maybe a calculated field or two if we need to lookup a value from another business object.” Hardly. First, the fields directly available from the Change Job business object do not include any fields that reference the currency from the Salary Plan, which is understandable. No problem, we’ll just create a calculated field to lookup the Compensation business process from the Change Job process. Great, except that field linking the two is blank. We’ll need to create further calculated fields to extract the Propose Compensation business process from the Business Processes Part of this Business Process field, and then look up the field from there. Except that the Employee Compensation Event business object doesn’t contain any fields for the salary currency either. We’ll need to lookup the Compensation Plan Assignment Snapshot and use the currency fields there. Wow… a longer journey than anticipated.

So, how did we know where to ultimately retrieve the value? I’d love to say it was my Sherlock Holmes-like mind palace. It wasn’t. It was my favorite report: Report Fields and Values.

Report Fields and Values essentially provides a Workday user with every single field associated with a given business object, as well as the corresponding value for a given instance: a 3D map, in effect, of the business object relationships, the fields, and the values associated, all in one beautiful snapshot. Aside from the requirement-driven motivations to use this report, it’s also an invaluable teaching tool for administrative users new to Workday. Just like View Security for Securable item helps to map out the relationships between business processes, tasks, and reports to security policies, Report Fields and Values illustrates the map for locating data. Report Fields and Values is available on basically any business object in Workday. Just select the related action from an object (e.g. a particular Worker in the tenant), then choose Reporting > Report Fields and Values.

Finding that needle in the haystack just got a little easier.

Author

  • Jen Kuzmick

    Jen Kuzmick has 10+ years of Workday experience across 50+ HCM, Recruiting, Benefits, Talent, and Reporting projects. She has worked for multiple Workday ecosystem partners going back to early 2009.