Custom reports

Custom Reports is for the reports the standard pages do not give you: your own selection of figures, arranged in your own order, under your own headings.

You reach them from a saved report: open the report, and choose Custom Reports in its action bar. The custom reports you build there are tied to that report’s selection of data, which is what keeps their figures consistent with it.

Configuring the report

New report (managers) creates one on the list. Inside it, a report is built from sections (Add section), and each section holds items (Add item, choosing Text, Metric or Monitoring Question).

• A section is a heading that groups things together.
• An item is one thing to show: a metric, or the answers to a monitoring question, or a piece of text.

Both sections and items can be reordered, which is how the report becomes something that reads in a sensible order rather than the order you happened to add things.

Each report is tied to a selection of data, in the same way a saved report is: a period and a scope, so the figures in it are the figures for that period.

Viewing and printing

A report has a view mode that shows the finished result without the editing controls, with a Print button that opens the browser’s print dialog over a clean, chrome-free copy. That is the version to open in a meeting or to print for somebody who does not use the dashboard.

What custom reports are good for

The standard pages answer the questions the system was built around. A custom report answers the questions your programme is asked, which are rarely identical:

• A funder’s quarterly template, with the same figures in the same order every quarter.
• A one-page summary for a ministry meeting, mixing a metric, a question’s answers and a note.
• An internal review that puts training numbers next to the indicators they were meant to move.

Build it once, reopen it every period

The value is in the reuse. The structure survives the period: reopen the report each term through its saved report and the same sections and items report the new period’s figures, so everyone keeps reporting the same numbers the same way.

Deleting a section takes its items

Removing a section removes everything inside it, and there is no undo. Be sure before removing a section somebody else built, particularly on a report that is being used for external reporting.

Metrics inside a report

An item can be a metric, which is why a metric already used in a custom report cannot be deleted: the dashboard refuses and asks you to remove it from the report first. See Creating and editing a metric.

Next: The Data Explorer