Building Customised Reports

By nature, all reports in ProWorkflows Reporting page are 'custom'. This is to say, you can treat any of the available reports as a starting point in constructing your own report.

For instance, you may be curious what item your teams have to complete this week, and you want to know who is responsible for what. The best starting point to figure that out would be a 'Summary of Items', due to the fact that that report will compile a grouped list of items that you can then filter by Due Date and group by Staff Assigned.

So, what steps will you go through and what tools do you have access to when building your own report?

Your starting points for reports can mostly be broken into two categories. The first is 'Summary of' reports. These will show you a list, where each row represents a single instance of the subject in question. For instance, in a Summary of Items report, each row will represent its own item. In a Summary of Projects report, each row represents a project.

The second type of reports you'll see use 'By' in their title, for example, 'Time Spent by Date Range' or 'Invoices by Paid Status'. As the titles suggest, these reports are comparative and will show the first subject as the main data point, and the second subject on the horizontal plane, and then use the grouping option on the vertical plane. For instance, with Time Spent by Date Range grouped by Staff will show time records in each cell, the horizontal axis will show dates, and the vertical axis will show the names of staff members.

There is a third type of report also; these tend to have a specific function with fewer customisable options. Generally, these are contained within the Staff section, for example, the Workload report.

Once your report type has been selected, you'll be in the report building screen. By default, the Filtering section is immediately available in the side bar. Generally, any given data point can be used as a filter. To return to this filter menu, click the icon highlighted below.

The available filters will change depending on what report you're viewing, for instance a Project report will only have filters pertaining to projects, but an Item report will have filters pertaining to both Items AND projects. Remember that each filter can contain multiple selections, for instance, you could choose several categories in the side bar and only projects belonging to those categories would be available. You can also invert that selection by enabling the 'Does Not Equal' field, which will show any projects that will not contain the selected options. Also remember that all filters will be running in conjunction via AND clauses.

Filters come as either Date Selectors, Drop Downs and Text Searches. For the date selectors, especially for saved reports, we encourage the use of relative date ranges. Selecting an option like 'This Week' will ensure your report is always current and up to date, as opposed to having to change the custom options every time you view the report.

Now that you've chosen which projects/items/etc are being shown in your report, now you can determine what information from those items is pulled through. Use the below highlighted icon to go to the Display Menu.

For example, for a report mainly focused on how much was invoiced over a series of projects, you may want to omit details relating to time spent, dates, and progress indicators as they distract from the main point of the report in question.

To alter your report in this way, you want to make sure that all the fields you do want are in the left-hand 'Selected' column, and the fields you dont want are in the right hand 'Available' column.

You may have several tabs of information available, as in the above screenshot. This is generally only for the 'Projects, Items and Time' report, as it contains three seperate data categories. Simply toggle between tabs to affect each category.

Now that you've filtered your report and chosen what data is shown, you'll want to save your report. Simply go to the 'i' icon at the top of of the toolbar, as highlighted below. Name the report using the Name field, and then choose the 'Save a Copy' option. You can also share your new report with other users from this same area using the 'Shared With' field.

Once a report has been saved, you might want to create a copy of it for a similar purpose. For instance, you may have one report looking at a historic version of the information and one looking at a current version, meaning its basically the same report with different filters. Copying the report is likely a faster way of making this happen, although you could make the second report from scratch.