Introducing the New UW Finance Cube!

April 23, 2024

Exciting news! The Reporting & Analytics team (R&A) and Finance DATAGroup have released the new UW Finance Cube! This represents a major advancement in connecting users to Workday data, providing greater flexibility over traditional Workday reports.

As of 4/23/24, this resource is now available to authorized users through the BI Portal.

Note: You must be logged into Husky OnNet (VPN) in order to access the links in this article. For more information, refer to Husky OnNet.

What is UW Finance Cube FY 2024?

The UW Finance Cube offers a comprehensive view of UW Finances for Fiscal Year 2024, including revenue, expenses, and beginning balances. It also allows users to analyze transactions at various levels using dimensions such as Ledger Account, Cost Center, Fund, Function, and many more!

More generally, a data cube is a powerful analysis tool, which allows users to quickly and easily slice and dice data across multiple dimensions, in a single view. For an introduction to cubes, including their benefits over traditional analysis tools such as reports, refer to the What is a Cube introductory video.

How will UW Finance Cube FY 2024 help me?

  1. Comprehensive Financial Insights: View financial data across multiple dimensions. Whether it’s analyzing research award expenditures and gift revenues or tracking procurement expenses, you can gain a holistic view of your financial landscape.
  2. Drill-Down Capabilities: Drill down from summaries to finer levels of information. This feature allows for more granular analysis and better decision-making.
  3. User-Friendly Pivot Tables: Connect to the cube and effortlessly create pivot tables by dropping prepopulated measures and dimensions into place.
  4. Preferred Analysis Tool: Connect to the cube via your preferred analysis tool (for example, Excel, Power BI, or Tableau) for seamless integration.

How reliable is the data?

Reliable! The data source for the cube is Workday Finance, so as long as the data in Workday is accurate, the data in the cube is accurate.

Additionally, while this is the first public-facing release, this is technically Release 3 (R3) for the cube. Prior releases allowed our development team to learn about Workday production data, design a scalable solution, capture applicable dimensions and measures, and conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with approximately 15 users across campus. UAT ensured the cube would meet user needs and helped us identify some additional dimensions to include in this release.

How do I get started?

Refer to UW Finance Cube Resources to download the base workbook and get connected to the new cube!

Questions?

Please contact help@uw.edu with “UW Finance Cube” in the subject line.