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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-02-07
Create Custom Reports

Create Custom Reports

Security: These domains in the System functional area:
  • Custom Report Creation
  • Manage: All Custom Reports
  • Report Tag Management
In addition to using Workday-delivered standard reports, you can create custom reports to analyze data in your tenant.
Workday recommends you create custom reports in Implementation or Sandbox tenants before migrating them to your production tenant, then validate the reports in case there's downstream impact to alerts and other processes. Before migrating reports, consider the downstream impact to edited reports in lower level tenants so that you don't migrate potential issues.
  1. Access the
    Create Custom Report
     task.
  2. As you complete the task, consider:
    Option Description
    Temporary Report
    Select to enable Workday to delete the report after 7 days.
    For all report types except simple reports, you can change the deletion date on the
    Advanced
     tab.
    Enable As Web Service
    For advanced or search reports, select to:
    • Use the report in an outbound EIB.
    • Enable external web sites to access the report.
    Set up
    Web Services Options
     on the
    Advanced
     tab.
    Optimized for Performance
    Unavailable for nBox and search reports. For reports using indexed data sources, select to display only indexed fields in field prompts.
    If you must use nonindexed fields, clear the check box on the
    Advanced
     tab.
    Data Source
    When selecting a data source, you can choose a data source from the
    Recommendation
     folder. Workday bases these recommendations on:
    • The most recently used data sources.
    • The most frequently used data sources.
    • Popular data sources between the user and other users with similar security groups.
    • Data sources with a similar name to the report name.
    For nBox and search reports, you can only select an indexed data source.
    When you select the
    Optimized for Performance
     check box, Workday limits the displayed options to only indexed data sources. To view and select standard or nonindexed data sources, clear the check box.
    Report Tags
    Create or select
    Report Tags
     to categorize your report and make it easier to find.
  3. As you complete the
    Additional Info
     section, consider:
    Option Description
    Comments
    Enter comments to track information, such as report notes, who requested the report, and so on. These internal comments won't display in the report output.
    Brief Description
    Workday displays the description in search results and in the related actions menu of the report.
When users run the report, they can click
Grid Preferences
 on the table toolbar to:
  • Change the order of columns.
  • Display or hide columns.
  • Freeze columns.
Grid Preferences
 displays for these report types:
  • Advanced
  • Composite
  • Simple
  • Transposed
Workday disables column freezing for composite reports that have:
  • Column or row groupings.
  • Multilevel column headers.
  • Repeating column groups.
If the report doesn't have columns eligible to freeze, Workday doesn't display the
Column Preferences
 menu to the report user.
Workday doesn't retain your grid preferences when you export the report, but retains them when you log into Workday.