Reports and saved views

Who can open Reports

Owners and administrators. A technician has no Reports item in their sidebar and cannot reach any of these screens by following a link to one. That is not a judgement about trust: a report is every customer's contact details, every site address and every completion note in one downloadable file, and it is the one place in the product where the whole customer book leaves the building. See your team for the three roles.

What the numbers across the top are counting

Reports opens on a strip of figures for a period. The period is a row of buttons labelled Figures for — Today, This week, Last week, This month, Last month, Last 90 days, All time — and it starts on This month. Nothing below the strip can change what the strip says.

The figures do not all count the same thing, and the ones that differ say so on screen rather than leaving you to guess:

• New, Assigned, Ongoing, Completed and Jobs in count work that arrived in the period — jobs raised between those two dates, whatever has happened to them since. Deleted jobs are left out of every figure on the page.
• Avg hours till attending, captioned Across the period's jobs. Every job in the period is in that average, including the ones recorded as zero, because the old system stored a zero where nothing was entered and thirteen years of reporting sit on the other side of that.
• Avg time on site, captioned Over N jobs that recorded it. The opposite treatment, deliberately: this figure is new, so no imported job carries it, and averaging the blanks in as zeroes would drag it down in exact proportion to how old your data is. See how long the job took.
• Awaiting sign-off, captioned All time, not this period. It is a queue rather than a period figure — a job completed in March that nobody has reviewed is precisely what the tile exists to nag about, and hiding it because March is not this month would make the number go down by forgetting.
• Completed per technician counts jobs finished in the period rather than raised in it, which is the only reading of that phrase a technician would accept — most of any week is finishing work that came in before it.

The five reports you already have

Below the figures is a grid of saved reports, and every company starts with five of them, badged Built in. They exist so that the screen answers a question on the day you first open it, and because the fastest way to make one of your own is to open one of these and change it.

• Completed last month — everything finished in the month just gone. Bounded by completion date, not creation date, so a job raised in June and finished in July belongs to July.
• Awaiting sign-off — completed work whose health and safety note nobody in the office has read. All time, because it is a queue.
• Unassigned jobs — new work nobody has picked up.
• Jobs by technician — this week — this week's work with the technician on it, assignee first, for the weekly catch-up.
• Legacy CSV export — the old system's export file, unchanged. More on that below.

The five are the company's furniture: they cannot be edited and they cannot be deleted, and their cards do not offer either. What they do offer is Copy, and a copy is an ordinary report of your own that you can change however you like. That is the intended route — open the one that is nearly right, change a filter, keep it under a name that suits your firm.

What a card on the grid is telling you

Each card carries the report's name and description, then two lines a name cannot carry: a plain-English summary of what it actually filters ("Completed, awaiting sign-off, by completion date"), and the period it covers. Under those is a live count — N jobs right now — which is counted when the page loads, by the same query that produces the list and the file. The card, the screen and the download cannot disagree.

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

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

A saved report stores the words — last month — and works out the two dates each time you open it. This is the thing worth understanding about the whole screen. A report called "Completed last month" gets opened on the third of every month for as long as your company exists; if saving it had written down 1–31 July, it would answer the right question exactly once and be quietly wrong for the rest of its life, in the worst possible way, because the numbers would still look like numbers.

So the named periods — Today, Yesterday, This week, Last week, This month, Last month, Last 90 days, All time — always mean what they say on the day you read them. Custom range is the exception and the escape hatch: pick a From and a To and the report is frozen to those dates, which is right for "the quarter we were audited on" and wrong for anything you plan to open again next month.

Every boundary is worked out in your company's timezone, not in 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 saved behind it. It is the same screen a saved report opens on, so changing one of the built-ins and pressing Save as new view gets you to the same place from the other direction.

What you can ask for:

• Status — any combination of the five, as toggles. Nothing ticked means every status.
• The period, plus a choice of which date it bounds: created, or completed. A From and To pair switches the period to Custom range as soon as you pick either.
• Assigned to — one person, or Anyone. There is a separate Nobody assigned tick.
• Sign-off — Any, Awaiting sign-off or Signed off.
• Company from — the sender's email address.
• Search — subject or reference.
• Include deleted jobs, which are otherwise left out.

The list below updates as you go, and the address bar keeps up with it — every filter is in the URL, so a report you have half-built is a link you can send to somebody. That is also why links to the old Reports page still work: the parameters they carry are the ones this screen reads.

Choosing the columns

Columns opens the list of 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. What you tick is what the table shows and what the CSV carries — the two are never allowed to differ. They always come out in the same order whatever order you ticked them in, so two reports sharing a column set produce files you can compare.

Saving it

Save as new view asks for a name, an optional description, and one tick: Share with everyone in the company. Leave it off and the report is yours alone; turn it on and it appears on the Reports grid for everyone who can open the screen. You can flip that later from the report itself.

Change anything on a report you have open and an Unsaved changes badge appears next to its name, so you know the list no longer matches what was saved before you decide what to do about it. Discard changes puts the saved filters back.

Save — plain, without "as new" — appears next to it only on a report you saved yourself. Somebody else's shared report, and any built-in, is read-only to you: change the filters all you like, but the only way to keep the result is a copy of your own. Two people disagreeing about what a shared report should ask is resolved by there being two reports, not by whoever saved last.

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 is on screen — the same filters, the same period, the same columns. There is no separate export configuration to keep in step with the report, because there is no second query: the file is the list.

Dates in the file are written the way a spreadsheet expects to read them, statuses are spelled the way the screen spells them, and an empty figure is empty rather than a misleading 0.

The one export that is not like the others

Legacy CSV export reproduces the old system's file byte for byte — the same columns, in the same order, spelled the same way, with the same date format. If something downstream of you has been parsing that file for years, it keeps parsing it. That is the whole reason this one view exists, so it is the one view whose columns you cannot pick.

Change its filters and you are asking a different question, and it exports as an ordinary report instead — answering a new question in a format whose only value is that it never changes would hand the downstream import a file about rows it has never seen. Untouched, it still produces the exact bytes. If you want the old shape as a starting point, take a copy of it: the copy is an ordinary report with ordinary columns.

Where the reports screen stops

Reports is for looking back — how the month went, and the questions you ask every month. It is deliberately not a second work-order board: for what needs doing today, the board has its own filters and attention buckets, and that screen is described in a work order, start to finish.

For one week laid out day by day rather than a month in aggregate, see the workload week.