Years after go-live, most tenants drift from how the business actually reports. Here's what we typically find — and where to start.
When we're called into a Workday Financials tenant that went live years ago, the symptoms vary — a slow close, reports nobody trusts, manual work that lives outside the system. But underneath, we usually find the same few structural problems.
The most common issue is a disconnect between how Workday reporting can — and should — be leveraged, and how the tenant was actually configured. A frequent pattern: reporting that depends on combining many different dimensions instead of resolving cleanly from a single one. One energy client, for example, relied on project and ledger account dimensionality combined to satisfy regulatory and statutory reporting — a structure that made every report harder than it needed to be.
The second pattern is non-homogeneity: parts of the same critical dimension built differently from each other. When half a dimension follows one convention and half follows another, process visibility suffers — people stop being able to reason about what the numbers mean, and workarounds multiply.
Most of this isn't anyone's fault. At the inception of an implementation, it's genuinely hard to understand how the configuration of a dimension will end up being used years later. The business evolves, reporting needs sharpen, and the original design quietly falls behind.
When we redesign, we start with reporting — for two reasons. First, financial reporting is one of the most critical requirements clients have of Workday, so it's where improvement is felt immediately. Second, reporting is diagnostic: building the reports the business actually needs exposes exactly where the structural gaps are.
A city government client had a spend category structure that was simultaneously too granular for financial reporting and not granular enough for procurement reporting — the same structure failing two audiences in opposite directions. Rather than tearing it down, we worked together to re-envision the relationship between spend categories and commodity codes, giving each area the granularity it needed. Financial reporting got cleaner rollups; procurement got the detail it was missing.
That's what a good redesign actually is: not a re-implementation, but a targeted realignment of structure to how the business reports and operates today.