A Report of Reports
A Report of Reports
Do you have teams within Workday who frequently need to leverage a specific set of reports (standard or custom)? Do they need to remember the names of those reports and search for them? If yes, here’s a quick win that might make their lives easier.
Let’s talk about a way to bundle reports together that is a lower-lift than creating a dashboard. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the answer is ANOTHER report!
If you have a series of reports that may not justify a dashboard, but it would be nice to bundle them together, a report of reports might be a good fit for you. Especially if it’s a series of advanced reports that are not necessarily aesthetically pleasing and aren’t intended to provide high-level summary metrics (for these situations, a dashboard is likely our best bet).
This custom report of reports (named something more clever and appropriate depending on your use-case) will be the only “name” your teams will need to remember & search for. The output is hyperlinks to all the reports they may need. If there are runtime prompts, clicking on that hyperlink will immediately prompt you from a pop-up window. If there are no runtime prompts, Workday will immediately run that report and generate it’s output.
How do I build it?
Our custom report of reports will be built off the data source Standard and Custom Reports I can Run. I usually only put one line in the columns tab for Report Definition > Report Task. This will output a hyperlink when the report generates for easy navigate to each individual report.
Without any filters, this will generate all the reports the end-user has access to. Which might be a lot. To streamline the output, I will usually put a Report Definition filter in place and hand-pick the reports I am bundling together.
And voila – report of reports! You can do this as many times as you need for however many sets of reports your team will find helpful.
Now, if you already have an existing dashboard – or you want to go the dashboard route – these sets of reports OR the report of reports we spoke about above can be added to a dashboard either in the Worklet or Menu tab. If adding as Worklets, be sure to pop into the Output tab of each report > Worklet Options and specify which dashboard(s) this report should available on.
