Workday, provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance, has introduced a new tool, Composite Reporting, that increases the breadth and depth of functionality in Workday Financial Management, as part of its latest release.
Composite Reporting, designed in partnership with customers CEC Entertainment, Life Time Fitness and Netflix, changes the way finance teams build, interact with and deploy multi-dimensional reports directly in Workday, leveraging the company’s in-memory computing architecture to conduct transaction processing and reporting live in a single-source system. The reporting tool was also designed to mimic the familiarity of working in spreadsheets.
“It comes with a design experience that’s very grid and spreadsheet-like,” explained Betsy Bland, Workday’s vice president of financial management products. “The learning curve of a tool like this is a lot lower users do not have to rely on a technology or IT person, and end up with these live reports on live data that are very interactive.”
Composite Reporting is part of the company’s latest release, Workday 23, which also includes new features for Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Student, and enhanced functionality for other industry-specific requirements.
For the financial services industry, this includes a wider breadth of financial management functionality for banking, insurance and diversified financial services companies, giving organizations the ability to select which books, accounts and Worktags to include in calculating and reporting the average daily balance.
The release also adds features for software and internet services organizations to help them better manage complex revenue models and respond to new revenue recognition requirements through the capability to auto-generate a revenue recognition schedule when submitting a customer contract or computing fair value revenue allocation to support customer contracts with multiple elements.
“Workday tends to focus on people-centric and talent-centric vertical markets,” said Bland. “We’re deepening the value of verticals for special markets.”
This also covers the education, government and nonprofit space, as Workday 23 provides greater flexibility in managing funds with the grants Worktag.
The release, the latest delivered through continuous development of a single line of code, supports Workday’s mission of modernizing reporting, according to Bland.
“Organizations are working to pull data together and need to put together quarterly reporting binders to auditors as part of the earnings process, extracting data from multiple systems and consolidating,” she said. “They depend on spreadsheets to bring data together and format data, but at Workday we think there can be a new and better way, a modern cloud-based financial system that makes the process easier, eases the burden, and helps them move forward in a new role as data providers. We want to help finance organizations burn that binder with a modern way to build reports and distribute them through the cloud.”
