Concept: Planning Calculations
You can use calculations either as building blocks for other calculations or to perform operations in a standalone capacity. As a best practice, fully plan out your calculations before building them in your tenant. Consider following these steps to design and build calculations.
- Gather business requirements.
- Determine the goal of the calculation. What do you want to accomplish? Are you determining eligibility or assigning an amount?
- Map out the design.
- Determine what types of calculations you need to meet each part of the business requirements. You might find it helpful to write out the hierarchy of calculations physically on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper.
- Devise a naming convention.
- A naming convention helps you communicate the scope and purpose of calculations, identify related calculations, and share calculations across functional areas. Examples: Consider names like1000orIs Student Resident?for simple building block calculations.For more specific calculations, consider using abbreviations to communicate attributes of the calculation in its name, such as its intended functional area. Example: Many schools maintain separate sets of calculations for Financial Aid and Student Financials.Examples:Acronyms and AbbreviationsMeaningFAFinancial AidSFStudent FinancialsACArithmetic calculationAGCAggregate calculationCCConditional calculationISCInstance set comparison calculationLCLogic calculationUGUndergraduateGRGraduateUNITCredits/UnitsBased on the example, the name for an arithmetic calculation that calculates a per credit rate of 100 for undergraduate students would beSF AC UG 100/UNIT.
- Determine reference IDs for calculations.
- Establish requirements and conventions for reference IDs for all of your calculations. Although Workday automatically generates a reference ID if you don't configure one, the automatically generated reference IDs might be difficult for you to interpret and manage.
- Build the calculations in a sandbox environment.
- If you’re new to building calculations, Workday recommends building calculations from the bottom up. Build the lowest and most heavily nested calculations first and then work your way up to the highest calculations. Many people find this approach more intuitive and comfortable regardless of their level of expertise with calculations.If you’re experienced with calculations, you can consider building calculations from the top down. Build the highest-level calculations first and work your way down. Use placeholder calculations as you build out the design and replace the placeholders as you create the lower-level calculations. You might find this approach useful when many lower-level calculations already exist in your tenant or if this perspective is more logical to you.
- Test thoroughly in a sandbox environment.
- Write out a number of different scenarios that use the calculation and the expected results. Compare the expected results with the actual results of the calculation and resolve any differences before implementing the calculations in a production environment. Anticipate errors and exceptions.Recommendation for Student calculations: The most effective way to test for expected results is to test the calculation on students who fit the criteria for the calculation. You might need to work with a student records administrator to identify the best students to test various calculations on.
- (Optional) Copy calculations.
- Save time and improve consistency by copying similar calculations instead of building each calculation from scratch. From the related actions menu of the calculation, select .You can also copy snapshots of advanced lookup tables, each with their own effective date and values.