Reimagining Reporting: The BI Portal and Workday Finance

To support UW Finance Transformation and the implementation of Workday Finance, the BI Portal report catalog has expanded to include Workday Finance and My Financial Desktop (MyFD) reports, providing a one-stop shop for users across the UW Academy.

These updates deployed to the BI Portal on 7/18/23.

Setting the Stage: The New UW Reporting Landscape

Workday Finance, which went live on 7/6/23, offers various financial reports, which users can access from within the Workday application. While these reports provide valuable insights into important data, there are some caveats.

Workday reports:

• Reflect data from limited subject areas: human resources/payroll and finance.
• Limit access by security role. If a user’s role does not allow access to a report, they are not able to find that report in Workday.
• Do not capture other enterprise reports that exist outside of the Workday ecosystem. If a user only looks for a report in Workday, they may miss out on other useful resources, like the Enterprise Data Warehouse, to explore enterprise data.

The BI Portal, which initially launched in 2013, offers reports, cubes, and dashboards to explore institutional data available in the Enterprise Data Warehouse and other enterprise data sources.

BI Portal reports, cubes, and dashboards:

• Reflect data from various subject areas: academics, advancement and alumni relations, core data, finance, human resources, property and space management, and research.
• Include historical data.
• Allow users to discover any report in the catalog. While a user’s security role determines which reports they can run, the BI Portal allows users to discover all available reports and view security information regardless of role.

Pulling it All Together: BI Portal’s Consolidated Report Catalog

On 7/18/23, the BI Portal finance report catalog expanded to include:

• Workday Finance reports (finance data from FY2024 and later)
• MyFD reports (finance data from FY2015 – FY2023)

This expansion provides several benefits for reporting users:

• Filtering new resources – Three new tags are now available to quickly drill-down to applicable reports: WORKDAY FINANCIAL, MYFD REPORTS, and LEGACY DATA. These tags are available as filters on the Catalog page and as tiles on the Home page.
  
  

• Searching across all enterprise reports – A consolidated catalog of rich report metadata allows users to search across all Workday and UW Academy reports in one user interface.
  
  
• Discovering available reports and associated security information – In Workday, reports are assigned by security role. The security role not only determines which reports the user can run, but which reports they can discover. In the BI Portal, a user can discover any report in the catalog. While a user’s security role determines which reports they can run, this visibility allows users to identify potentially useful reports, check the Security Information tab to determine which roles have access, and then request elevated access, if warranted.
  
  
• Identifying reports with legacy data – Non-Workday finance reports in the BI Portal reflect legacy data following the close of FY2023. This is also the case for the new MyFD reports. Development of new non-Workday finance reports is underway now that Workday production data is available.
  
  

Questions?

Please submit questions as follows to ensure they reach the appropriate team and get a quicker response.