Reports

A report is a question you have asked once, kept so you can ask it again. You choose a set of rows, narrow it, and arrange the answer as a table or a chart. The rows are not saved, only the question, so the same report answers next month's question about the same thing rather than showing you a picture of last month's answer.

Reports live under Reports in the desk, and they are on the phone too. Anything you pin appears on your board, so the question the practice asks every morning is the first thing you see.

Building one#

Start from a dataset, which is the set of rows the report can read:

Then choose how to read it. Rows shows the records themselves, the columns you pick; Summary groups them and measures each group. A date can be grouped by day, week, month, quarter or year, which is how "revenue by month" is really "payments, grouped by month, summed".

Filters narrow it: a column, a way of comparing it, and a value. The value box changes with the column, so a status offers the statuses that exist and a date expects a date.

Save keeps it under a name, Save as keeps a copy, and Pin to my board puts it on the board itself. Share with your team makes it readable by everyone in the practice; leave it off and the report is yours alone. Export CSV hands the rows to a spreadsheet, with money as plain numbers and its currency in the column beside it.

What a report can see#

A report can only name a column the practice has already agreed to expose, and a column it does not carry is refused with a plain reason rather than run. More importantly, a report sees the rows you can see. A colleague's wedding is not in your report, and a couple's report is their own wedding and nothing else. That is not a setting: it is the same access rule the rest of the product follows, so there is no report that reads a practice's whole book.

Reports are bounded on purpose. A report gives up after five seconds and after five thousand rows, and tells you when it did rather than quietly showing you a partial answer as if it were the whole one.

Starting points#

Eight are ready to open, and each is an unsaved copy you can change: revenue received by month, outstanding by wedding, deals by source and stage, weddings by month, tasks overdue by who they are assigned to, time by wedding, time by person by week, and attending guests by wedding.

The board#

The board answers four questions before you ask anything: what is on today and tomorrow, who owes you money and who owes their vendors, what came in lately, and what Lorenzo made of the week. The first two are the same on the phone.

Hours this week only appears once there is time to show. The weekly notes are three plain observations written from your own numbers, each naming the figures it is about, so you can check them against the cards. They are written once a week on Monday morning, and Refresh is offered once a day if you want them sooner. Lorenzo answers "how is the business doing?" from the same numbers in chat.