Reports and dashboards

Your application can answer the questions every business asks of its own records: how many, how much, how that has moved month by month, and which ones need chasing. It does this with reports, gathered on a dashboard for each role, and staff can build more of their own.

Ask for a report or a dashboard

Reports and dashboards are part of your application, so you get them by asking on Changes (see Ask for a change). Say who it is for and what it should show. For example:

• "Give the office a dashboard with jobs completed each month this year, and open jobs by engineer."
• "Show each engineer how many jobs they finished each week."
• "Bookings per stylist each week, as a bar chart, for the salon manager."
• "A table of unpaid invoices, oldest first, for the accounts team."

The templates come with a dashboard for every role that signs in (see Templates and the marketplace). Removing a report later is a change too, and it stops every schedule of that report.

What a report can show

A report is about one kind of record, such as jobs, bookings or orders, and can:

• count them, or give the total, average, smallest or largest of a number on them;
• group them by a value, such as by engineer or by status;
• follow them over time, by day, week, month, quarter or year, over a stretch such as the last 12 months;
• list them as a table, with the columns and order you choose;
• only include some, such as jobs that are open, or bookings in the last 30 days.

It is shown as one figure, bars, a line or a table. Every chart has Show the figures under it, which opens the same numbers as a table.

Everyone sees their own figures

A report is always worked out as the person looking at it, with their own permissions. So the same report shows the office every job and an engineer only theirs. Records someone can't see are left out of their figures. See Permissions: who can see and do what.

Where your application holds health information, or information about children, a group of fewer than 5 records is never shown as a number. It reads "fewer than 5", and small groups are folded together, so nobody can be picked out from a figure.

What your staff do with reports

Anyone in a role that has a report gets a Reports link in your application.

• Their dashboard shows their role's dashboards first, then any reports they pinned.
• Build a report opens a builder that offers only the records and fields that person can see. They choose what the report is on, how to show it, what to measure and any conditions, press Preview to try it, and Save to keep it.
• Share with others in your role lets colleagues in the same role open a saved report, each seeing their own figures. Sharing never reaches another role.
• Pin to my dashboard puts a saved report on their own dashboard.
• Download as CSV gives the report as a spreadsheet file, with only what that person can see. A cell is never a formula. Where records hold health information or information about children, the rows can't be downloaded, only the figures.

Have a report emailed

On a report's page, under Send it by email, a member chooses how often (Every day, Every week on a chosen day, or On the 1st of each month) and the hour, and presses Schedule it.

• Each person gets their own figures, as their own role sees them. If nobody else could open the report as themselves, it is sent only to the person who scheduled it.
• The email carries the totals and a link, never the rows and never an attachment. A table's email says how many rows there are and links to them.
• It needs a recent sign-in. Setting up a schedule needs the member's passkey or authenticator app used in the last five minutes. A schedule stops after 90 days unless they press Keep sending, which asks for the same.
• It stops by itself if the person who set it up leaves, changes role or can no longer see what it covers. It says why on the report's page and does not start again on its own.

Figures on a record's own page

Separately from reports, a record's page can show figures about the records linked to it. For example, a customer's page can show:

• figures, such as how many visits they have had and what they have spent;
• a chart of those records, grouped or over time;
• a calendar of them on the days they fall;
• a board with a column for each status, such as "booked", "in progress" and "done". A board only shows the records. It can't be used to move them between columns unless your application has an action for that.

Ask for these on Changes too, for example: "On each customer's page, show their bookings on a calendar and how much they have spent."

What you can't do yet

• Put a saved report on a record's page. Use the figures and charts above instead.
• Total the money on issued orders or invoices in a report. A report can count them, but can't yet add up what they came to.
• Email a report to somebody outside your application. Only members who could open it themselves receive it.