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We’re excited to share a major enhancement in Workday: embedded reports are now available directly within Award, Grant, Cost Center, and Gift worktags! This update simplifies workflows by providing instant access to balances, activities, and budget-to-actuals data. With this enhancement, users are able to view relevant worktag data in one place, without needing to run separate reports!

This article breaks down these enhancements by worktag and explains how to display these new reports within the Workday interface.

Award Worktag

The Award Line Budget to Actuals report is now embedded within the Award worktag. This report provides some grant attributes, budget, life-to-date spend, encumbrance balance, and remaining balance data. This is the same report that is on the Sponsored Grants tab of the PI and Grant Manager Dashboards.

To find this report, display an award worktag, click the Additional Reports tab, and then click the Award Line Budget to Actuals report.

Grant Worktag

 

The Grant Budget to Actuals report is now embedded within the Grant worktag. This report provides some grant attributes, budget, life-to-date spend, encumbrance balance, and remaining balance data. This is the same report that is on the Sponsored Grants tab of the PI and Grant Manager Dashboards.

To find this report, display a grant worktag and click the Grant Budget to Actuals tab.

 

Cost Center Worktag

There are three new reports now embedded within the Cost Center worktag:

• Actuals with Exclusions – This report provides beginning balance, activity by high-level category, ending balance, and encumbrance balance data. This report defaults to Common Book and excludes FD200, FD209, FD300, and FD400.
• Related Grant Budget to Actuals – This report provides some grant attributes, budget, life-to-date spend, encumbrance balance, and remaining balance data. It returns transactions where the Cost Center is used with any Grant worktag. Note that the Default Cost Center on individual Grants may be different. This is the same report that is on the Sponsored Grants tab of the PI and Grant Manager Dashboards.
• Expendable Gift Activity – This report provides some gift attributes, beginning balance, net change in net position, ending balance, and encumbrance balance data. It returns transactions where the Cost Center is used with any Gift worktag. Note that the Default Cost Center on individual Gifts may be different.

To find these reports, display a cost center worktag and then click the applicable tab: Actuals with Exclusions, Related Grant Budget to Actuals, or Expendable Gift Activity.

 

Gift Worktag

There are three new reports now embedded within the Gift worktag:

• Current FY Expendable & Non-Expendable Fund Activities – This report provides beginning balance, activity by high-level category, ending balance, and encumbrance balance data. This report defaults to Common Book and splits columns into Expendable and Non-Expendable Funds.
• Current FY Quarterly CEF Activities – This report provides beginning balance, net change in units and amounts grouped by FY quarters, and ending balance data. This report is only applicable for pooled gifts.
• Historical Fair Market Value – This report provides valuations for the last 6 quarters. This report is only applicable for pooled gifts.

To find the Current FY Expendable & Non-Expendable Fund Activities and Current FY Quarterly CEF Activities reports, display a gift worktag, click the Transactions tab, and then click the applicable report: Current FY Expendable & Non-Expendable Fund Activities or Current FY Quarterly CEF Activities.

 

To find the Historical Fair Market Value report, display a pooled gift worktag, click the Overview tab, and then click the Historical Fair Market Value report.

 

Questions?

Please contact datagrp@uw.edu to initiate a ticket with the Finance DATAGroup.

Have you ever spent hours on a repetitive data task—perhaps it’s a quarterly report or a response to a frequent inquiry—only to wonder, “Is this the best use of my time?”

Are you populating forms, cleaning up spreadsheets, or cross-referencing numbers? What could you accomplish if these processes were streamlined or even automated? More time for strategic projects? Campus outreach? Maybe just a chance to step back and focus on the big picture?

This is where the Business Intelligence (BI) team comes in. We specialize in transforming how you access and use data. Through reports, cubes, and dashboards, we simplify processes, automate workflows, and ensure enterprise data is at your fingertips—limited, of course, to the data you have permission to access. Rooted in partnerships across campus, our work evolves through collaboration, uncovering needs, solving problems, and building solutions that scale with users over time.

A Year in Review: Highlighting Our Work with GCA

While we deliver solutions for many groups across campus, a standout partnership this year has been with Grant and Contract Accounting (GCA). This partnership showcases a variety of solutions, made possible through iterative development, clear communication, and the expertise of several teams across campus.

A special thanks to the following groups within UW Finance, Planning & Budgeting for their time and expertise, which were essential for our work with GCA:

• DATAGroup – Provided subject matter expertise on finance and grant data.
• Shared IT Services (specifically Nate Ayres) – Migrated legacy data to the Central Finance Reporting Database (CFRDB) and created views within this database for cross-era reporting.

This section highlights many of the BI solutions delivered for GCA in 2024.

Federal Financial Report (SF425) Suite

The SF425 report, or Federal Financial Report, standardizes the submission of financial data for individual grant awards, ensuring compliance with federal reporting requirements. Submitting the SF-425 form is essential to comply with regulations, maintain funding, secure future grants, and preserve strong agency relationships—without the SF425 report, there is no funding.

Previously, GCA manually populated these reports, which was time-consuming, error-prone, and complicated by the need for cross-era data in the post-Finance Transformation environment.

The BI team’s solutions have streamlined this process, providing three SF425-related tools in the BI Portal to support submission requirements.

• Federal Financial Report (SF425) – This report generates two outputs, which capture a grant’s cumulative expenses. Outputs include:
  • A completed SF425 form, with data in the correct format
  • Close Out Documents (PI Letter, Primary/Non-Primary Detail, and Close Out Actions)
• Federal Financial Report (SF425) NASA – This report consolidates all NASA Federal Financial Reports (covering approximately 90 UW awards) into a single file for bulk upload. NASA is the only sponsor that accepts this format.
• SF425 – Bulk Process – This report generates a file that lists all awards, including metadata, that meet the selected parameters and have an Award Task Status of Not Started. This file is then used in an automated flow to produce SF425 report PDFs for each award without manual input.

Report of Expenditures (ROE)

Similar to the SF425 suite, the Report of Expenditures (ROE) automates a previously manual process for non-federal UW financial reporting when no sponsor format exists.

To support cross-era reporting, this interim ROE report supplements the Workday ROE report (July 2023 – present) by providing the legacy data needed for interim ROE reporting.

Calculated vs. Actual Indirect Cost Report

This report helps users ensure actual indirect costs (IDC) for a budget were calculated correctly. This report compares IDC transactions to the calculated IDC rate and the budget’s actual Facilities and Administration (F&A) expenditures. This allows users to determine whether IDC expenses for a Workday award were calculated correctly or if an adjustment is required.

Federal Interest by Federal Grant

This report tracks daily interest earned on federally funded grants when cash on hand exceeds expenditures. The University owes interest on the difference, calculated daily and remitted annually to the federal government. This one report replaces two reports that were used in the pre-Workday era: Total Interest by Federal LOC Grant and Total Interest by Federal Invoiceable Budget.

Legacy System Retirement Reports

As part of the broader UW-IT initiative to retire legacy systems, the BI team collaborated with GCA to ensure continued access to BGT and FIN/FAS data in preparation for the retirement of these systems. The following reports were created through this collaboration:

• Grant and Contract Accounting Budget Revisions Report (BGT)
• Budget Number Index Audit Trail (FIN/FAS)

A Report Tag to Tie it All Together

With all the new reports in GCA’s toolbox, they needed a better way to manage them. To do this, a Grant and Contract Accounting tag was added to quickly drill-down to GCA reports, including all of the new reports mentioned above. This tag is available as a tile on the BI Portal Home page and also as a filter on the Catalog page.

Questions/Feedback/Ideas?

Would you like to partner with Business Intelligence on a report, cube, or dashboard? Please submit a ticket to help@uw.edu with “BI Portal” in the subject line.

Thanks to collaboration between UW-IT’s Reporting & Analytics, Web Applications team and FPB: Budget, Planning, & Operations (BPO), the BI Portal report catalog now includes Workday Adaptive Planning reports!

The updates deployed to the BI Portal on 12/4/24.

What is Workday Adaptive Planning?

Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis tool, which:

• Resides within the Workday platform, leveraging data from both the Workday HCM and Finance modules.
• Provides comprehensive insights for streamlined planning and budgeting processes.
• Delivers accurate and complete financial information.
• Supports the development of UW’s annual operating budget.

For more information about this tool, refer to the Benefits of Workday Adaptive.

Understanding the “Why” Behind this Change

The goal of BI Portal reports, cubes, and dashboards is to:

• 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 Workday 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.

Bringing Workday Adaptive Planning reports into the BI Portal aligns with the broader reporting strategy for UW Academy, which is to provide users with a one-stop-shop for all reporting needs.

Accessing Workday Adaptive Planning Reports in the BI Portal

Users can find Workday Adaptive Planning reports in the same way they find other resources in the BI Portal. A couple tips:

• Filter by the new tag – A Workday Adaptive Planning tag is available on the Catalog page to quickly drill-down to applicable reports.
  
• Discover available Workday Adaptive Planning 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 will still determine 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.
  

Questions?

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

If you have questions that relate to…	Then…
The actual Adaptive Planning reports and associated data… Access to Workday Adaptive Planning reports…	Adaptive Support Request Form
Entries for Workday Adaptive Planning Reports in the BI Portal (for example, information on the report detail pages, metadata, links, etc.)…	Contact help@uw.edu with “BI Portal Workday Adaptive Planning Reports” in the subject line.

 

Thanks to a collaborative effort between UW-IT’s Business Intelligence (BI) and Web Applications teams, along with valuable input from the School of Nursing, the Student Employees Dashboard is now available in the BI Portal!

Turning Ideas into Insights

The Catalyst for Development

The dashboard project began with a request from a department within the School of Nursing, which relied on manual queries of the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) to access student employee data. Although effective, this method required a manual process and technical expertise. The department needed a more efficient, user-friendly solution that could be easily accessed by all staff.

The BI Team saw potential for a solution that could benefit other departments. They set out to design a dashboard that would offer insights into student employee data.

A User-Centric, Yet Scalable Solution

Dashboard development starts with understanding the data—specifically, the data users need and where it comes from. While the initial request focused on data for a single HR organization (the School of Nursing), which could be sourced from the EDW, the team saw value in creating a solution that could scale across the University. However, to achieve this broader application, an additional data source was needed.

The team identified two sources for the necessary data: Workday (HR Hierarchy) and the EDW (student employee detail). The Web Applications team pulled the applicable data from these two sources into Snowflake—a cloud-based data warehousing platform—to create a comprehensive view, which is processed and updated daily. This view serves as the data source for a Tableau extract, which is refreshed daily at 7:00 am.

With the Tableau extract available, the BI Team built a Tableau dashboard, eliminating the need for manual queries, and providing departments across campus with instant, accurate, and up-to-date insights on student employees. Throughout development, the team collaborated closely with the School of Nursing to ensure the dashboard continued to meet their specific needs while also serving a broader audience.

Access

While this dashboard can be used across campus, access is restricted to users with the Administrator/Manager/FiscalTech ASTRA role.

Exploring the Dashboard

Check out the Student Employees dashboard in the BI Portal to explore the tool, including the following features.

Filters

The left panel of the dashboard provides a number of filters, which allow users to narrow results by Employee Status, Position Start Date, and/or various levels of the HR Hierarchy. For more information about these filters, refer to the Filters tab for the dashboard in the BI Portal.

Search

The top of the dashboard provides two search fields, which allow users to search for a specific student by Student Number or UW NetID.

Results

The center of the dashboard displays the results, based on the filter or search specifications. Additionally, each row in the results includes a Magnifying Glass icon, which the user can hover over to display additional detail for a specific student.

Questions/Feedback/Ideas?

Do you have a question about this dashboard and/or a request for a new resource in the BI Portal? Please submit a ticket to help@uw.edu with “BI Portal” in the subject line.

The Reporting & Analytics team (R&A) and Finance DATAGroup have released new versions of the UW Finance Cube and UW Balance Sheet Cube for FY 2024 and FY 2025! Thanks to user feedback, the following updates are now available!

Drill-through functionality for Workday journals (UW Balance Sheet Cube/UW Finance Cube)

You can now connect directly to a Workday journal from the cube with just one click. This feature makes it easy to view detailed journal entries after drilling through to journal line details.

New dimensions (UW Balance Sheet Cube/UW Finance Cube)

• UW Balance Sheet Cube:
  • BudgetDate
  • JournalFirstPostedDate
• UW Finance Cube:
  • BudgetDate
  • JobFamilyDescription
  • JournalFirstPostedDate
  • Position
  • Position Number
  • Salary over the cap
  • Worker Name

Enhanced sorting functionality (UW Finance Cube only)

You can now sort values for the following dimensions alphabetically by name, in addition to the existing code/name format (for example, AC100001 – AC100001 UWIT | ServiceNow Licenses):

• Activity
• Appropriation
• Assignee
• Award
• Award Line
• Balancing Unit
• Cost Center
• Customer
• Function
• Fund
• Gift
• Grant
• Internal Service Provider
• Ledger Account
• Object Class
• Program
• Project
• Resource
• Revenue Category
• Spend Category
• Sponsor
• Supplier

Not seeing what you’re looking for in this release?

There is another release planned for October, so watch your inbox for an announcement! In the meantime, if you have questions or feedback on any of these cubes, please email help@uw.edu with “BI Portal Finance Cube” in the subject line.