Reports and saved views

Who can open Reports

Only owners and administrators. Technicians don't have Reports in their sidebar, and they can't open any of these screens from a link either. A report puts every customer's contact details, every site address and every completion note into one downloadable file, so it's limited to the people who run the business. See your team for the three roles.

What the numbers across the top are counting

Reports opens with a row of figures for a period. You choose the period with the buttons labelled Figures for: Today, This week, Last week, This month, Last month, Last 90 days and All time. It starts on This month. Nothing further down the page changes these figures.

The figures don't all count the same thing. Where one is different, the screen says so:

• New, Assigned, Ongoing, Completed and Jobs in count jobs that came in during the period, whatever has happened to them since. Deleted jobs are left out of every figure on the page.
• Avg hours till attending, with the caption Across the period's jobs. This average includes every job in the period, even ones recorded as zero. That's because the old system saved a zero when nothing was entered, and years of past reports were worked out that way.
• Avg time on site, with the caption Over N jobs that recorded it. This one only counts jobs where a time was recorded. It's a new figure, so imported jobs don't have it, and counting them as zero would make the average far too low. See how long the job took.
• Awaiting sign-off, with the caption All time, not this period. This counts every completed job that still needs signing off, whenever it was completed. A job completed in March that nobody has reviewed still needs doing, so it stays in the count even when you're looking at this month.
• Completed per technician counts jobs finished in the period, not jobs that came in during it. Most of a week's work is usually finishing jobs that arrived earlier.

The five reports you already have

Below the figures are your saved reports. Every company starts with five, marked Built in. They give you something useful the first time you open Reports, and the quickest way to make your own report is to copy one of them and change it.

• Completed last month: every job finished in the previous month. It goes by the completion date, not the date the job came in, so a job raised in June and finished in July counts in July.
• Awaiting sign-off: completed jobs whose health and safety note nobody in the office has signed off yet. It covers all time, not a period.
• Unassigned jobs: new work nobody has picked up.
• Jobs by technician, this week: this week's jobs and who has each one, sorted by technician, for the weekly catch-up.
• Legacy CSV export: the same export file the old system produced. More on that below.

You can't edit or delete the built-in reports, so their cards don't offer either. Instead, each card has a Copy button. A copy is an ordinary report of your own that you can change however you like. So find the one that's closest to what you want, copy it, change a filter, and save it with a name that suits your firm.

What a card on the grid is telling you

Each card shows the report's name and description. Below that it shows, in plain English, what the report filters (for example, "Completed jobs, awaiting sign-off, by completion date") and the period it covers. Under those is a count, N jobs right now, worked out when the page loads. It uses the same search as the list and the download, so all three always agree.

A badge in the corner shows who can see the report: Built in, Shared or Only you.

Why a report says "last month" instead of two dates

A saved report remembers the period by name, such as last month, and works out the dates each time you open it. So a report called "Completed last month" always shows last month, whenever you open it. If it had saved the dates 1–31 July instead, it would only be right in August, and after that it would keep showing July without any sign that it was out of date.

So the named periods (Today, Yesterday, This week, Last week, This month, Last month, Last 90 days and All time) always mean what they say on the day you open the report. Custom range is different. Pick a From and a To date and the report stays fixed to those dates. That's right for something like "the quarter we were audited on", but not for a report you'll want to open again next month.

Days, weeks and months are worked out in your own timezone, not UTC, so "this month" starts at midnight where you are.

Building a report of your own

New report, at the top right, opens the filter screen with nothing set. It's the same screen a saved report opens in, so you can also start from one of the built-in reports, change it, and press Save as new view.

You can filter by:

• Status: any combination of the five. If you don't pick any, every status is included.
• The period, and whether it goes by the date the job was created or the date it was completed. As soon as you pick a From or To date, the period changes to Custom range.
• Assigned to: one person, or Anyone. There's also a separate Nobody assigned tick box.
• Sign-off: Any, Awaiting sign-off or Signed off.
• Company from: the sender's email address.
• Search: the subject or reference.
• Include deleted jobs. Deleted jobs are left out unless you tick this.

The list updates as you go, and so does the address in your browser. Every filter is in the web address, so you can send someone a link to a report you're still putting together. It also means links to the old Reports page still work.

Choosing the columns

Columns lists all eighteen: reference, the three dates, customer, sender, subject, status, urgency, assignee, site, hours till attending, time on site, the two sign-off columns, and the completion, health and safety and deletion notes. The columns you tick are the ones shown in the table and included in the CSV file. They always appear in the same order, whatever order you ticked them, so two reports with the same columns give you files you can compare.

Saving it

Save as new view asks for a name, an optional description, and whether to Share with everyone in the company. If you leave that unticked, only you can see the report. If you tick it, it appears in Reports for everyone who can open Reports. You can change this later from the report itself.

If you change anything on a report you have open, an Unsaved changes badge appears next to its name, so you know the list no longer matches what was saved. Discard changes puts the saved filters back.

A plain Save button appears next to it only on reports you saved yourself. You can't save changes to someone else's shared report or to a built-in report. You can change the filters as much as you like, but to keep the result you'll need to save it as your own copy. If two people want a shared report to do different things, they each end up with their own report.

Copy, on a card, does the same thing in one click. You get "Awaiting sign-off (copy)", owned by you and private until you share it.

Getting it out as a spreadsheet

CSV on any card, or Export to CSV from an open report, downloads exactly what's on screen: the same filters, the same period and the same columns. There are no separate export settings to keep up to date.

Dates in the file are in a format spreadsheets understand, statuses are spelled the same way as on screen, and a missing figure is left blank instead of showing a misleading 0.

The one export that isn't like the others

Legacy CSV export produces exactly the same file as the old system: the same columns, in the same order, with the same names and the same date format. If another system has been reading that file for years, it will keep working. That's why it's the only report where you can't choose the columns.

If you change its filters, it downloads as an ordinary report instead, because the system reading the old file might not cope with different rows. If you leave it as it is, you'll still get exactly the same file. If you'd like to start from the old layout and change it, make a copy. The copy is an ordinary report with columns you can choose.

Where the reports screen stops

Reports is for looking back, at how the month went and the questions you ask every month. For what needs doing today, use the board, which has its own filters and tiles. It's described in a work order, start to finish.

To see one week laid out day by day, see the workload week.