Temporary Reports in Workday, Part 1 of 2
In this first of a two-part blog focused on Workday Temporary Reports, we will look at the below introductory topics:
1. Introduction to Temporary Reports
2. How may a custom report be made temporary?
3. How can we obtain a list of all temporary reports?
4. How may a temporary report be deleted?
5. Conclusion
In the second part of this series, we'll delve into best practices, strategies for avoiding potential issues, and tips for writing a report to help manage custom reports.
INTRODUCTION TO TEMPORARY REPORTS
Workday delivers a plethora of Standard reports for various Functional Areas; however, it is not always possible for Standard reports to satisfy all user requirements. Thus, users are required to create custom reports to meet the needs that the Standard reports cannot satisfy.
Creation of Custom reports always comes in handy and they see many uses within Workday such as Integration, Dashboard, Worklets, Data Audits, etc. And, Workday’s Report Writer is so user-friendly that users many times find it easy to create a new report right away rather than search for an existing Standard or custom report to avoid duplication. This leads to the presence of many redundant reports cluttering the system. So, how to clear out the clutter? Does the user review each report from time to time and manually delete the ones that are no longer in use? Could be, if there are 5 or 10 or 20 reports in the tenant. What if there are hundreds of reports? This is where the concept of “Temporary Reports” comes into play.
Temporary reports enable you to reduce clutter in your tenant by marking obsolete reports for deletion, and then deleting them in bulk. Users can mark any custom report as temporary. By default, newly created custom reports are not flagged as temporary. The creation and management of temporary reports are discussed further in this blog.
How to Make a Custom Report Temporary
There are two ways to make a custom report temporary in Workday:
a) When creating a new custom report – Users can designate a new custom report as temporary by checking the box ‘Temporary Report’ on the initial screen under the ‘Report Details’ section as shown below.
b) When editing an existing custom report – Users can designate an existing custom report as temporary by checking the box ‘Temporary Report’ from the ‘Advanced’ tab of the report definition. The date can be changed for all report types except for simple reports.
Temporary reports have an expiration date, which is set to seven days from the current date by default as visible from the field “Date Report Definition will be Deleted” in the above screenshot. This date can be changed, by editing the report, but it cannot be set to a date in the past as the error in the screenshot shows below.
If there is a need to provide report writer access to many users in your organization, but you want to avoid cluttering the tenant, you can restrict users to create only temporary reports by assigning them to the “Ability to Create Only Temporary Reports” domain. Users will still be able to access all other reporting features.
How to Obtain a List of All Temporary Reports
Just like the way users can get the list of all Standard Reports and all Custom Reports, they would also want to know how many of all the Custom Reports are Temporary. This can easily be known by running the report “All Custom Reports”. When running “All Custom Reports”, the ‘Is Temporary’ checkbox should be ticked in the prompts which will generate a list of all custom reports that are checked as temporary in the tenant. Additionally, users can also tick the ‘Past Deletion Date’ box to know the temporary reports that have a deletion date that has passed.
To obtain a list of all custom reports that are marked as temporary, run the report “All Custom Reports” and tick the ‘Is Temporary’ checkbox in the prompts. To see temporary reports that have already passed their expiration date, tick the ‘Past Deletion Date’ box.
How to Delete a Temporary Report
As obvious as it may sound from the label “Date Report Definition will be Deleted”, that Workday automatically deletes the reports flagged as temporary. However, it isn’t the case. Temporary reports that have expired remain in the tenant until one of the following tasks is performed in the tenant.
a) Delete My Temporary Report Definitions – Report writers can run this task to delete the temporary report definitions that are owned by them.
b) Delete All Temporary Report Definitions – Admins can run this task to delete all the temporary report definitions that exist in the tenant.
Both tasks can also be scheduled to run on a regular basis. As shown in the screenshot above, the Run Frequency can be set to schedule the task and Workday permanently deletes any temporary reports that expire on or before the date when the task runs.
Conclusion of PART 1 OF 2
In this blog, we discussed the concept of temporary reports in Workday. As we saw, ticking a simple checkbox can help save some manual work maintaining custom reports in Workday. Admins can easily manage the bulk deletion of obsolete reports and reduce the clutter in the tenant thereby simplifying the overall maintenance of your Workday tenant.
The next blog will look at some best practices for temporary reports, and introduce ways to help manage reports in general, regardless of if they were marked as temporary when initially created.
