Use this link to share with your colleagues:
Basic Reporting Customizations: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1156198
PatronManager has lots of helpful reports built into the system. Sometimes, they'll be perfect right off the bat. Other times, they need one more piece of information to be perfect for your needs. Luckily, you can customize reports in PatronManager! We'll introduce you to a few basic reporting customizations to get you started.
Specifically, we'll cover:
- What to consider before you customize a report
- The three ways to customize reports
- How to add a filter to a report
- How to summarize a report with fields
- How to Add, remove and organize field columns in a report
Need a primer on reporting? Check out our All About Reporting article for an introduction to reports in PatronManager.
What to consider before you customize a report
To figure out where to start when when editing a report, ask yourself these two questions:
- What do you want to know?
- What are you going to use it for?
For example, this:
- What do you want to know?
- I want to see everyone coming to tonight’s show
- What are you going to use it for?
- I need to know whether or not they’ve paid so I can collect money as I check them in
Needs a different report than this:
- What do you want to know?
- I want to see everyone coming to tonight’s show
- What are you going to use it for?
- I want to send them a follow up e-mail campaign next week
You can customize your Report in three ways
There are three ways you can customize a report to suit your needs:
- Groupings: Add groupings to summarize the report by certain fields
- Fields: Add fields you want displayed to the report as columns
- Filters: Use filters to include or exclude certain information from a report
Let's take a looksie at each of these!
How to add a filter to a report
You can add report filters to tailor a report to meet your needs. For this example, let's say you wanted to filter a Contacts report to show Contacts with Confirmed Opt-In email addresses who are also VIPs.
1. Navigate to the Reports tab
If you don't see the Reports tab in the main tab bar, click on the App Launcher to access all tabs.
2. Find the report template you'd like to build your report from
Use the search bar to narrow your results. In this case, we'll start from the All Confirmed Opt-In Contacts report template.
If you don't see the Confirmed Opt-In report, make sure you're on All Reports.
Want to explore PatronManager's pre-loaded report templates? Check out "Library of Useful Pre-Loaded Reports" for more on this topic.
3. Click "Edit"
4. Before you do anything, click "Save As"
If you're working from one of our packaged report templates, click "Save As" and give the report a new name - this ensures you won't overwrite the original report template.
5. Fill in the report details and click "Save"
- Report Name: Give your report an appropriate, unique name
- Report Unique Name: This autofills based on the Report Name field
- Report Description: Briefly describe what the report will show, and how you'll use it - your colleagues and future you will be thankful
- Folder: File the report in a folder that makes sense
- Click "Save"
6. Great! Now toggle to the Filters tab in the left panel
7. Search for the field you'd like to filter by
Type the field name into the "Add filter..." search bar. If you don't see the field right away, you may need to select a different Report Type.
8. Select the field you'd like to filter by
9. Set up the filter with your desired criteria, and click "Apply"
Make sure your filter includes or excludes the right people from your report. In this case, we want to include only Contacts whose VIP box is checked. In other words, we're excluding Contacts who aren't VIPs. The filter should look like this:
- Field: VIP?
- Value: True
- Click "Apply"
10. The results will update based on the filter - Click "Run"
11. Add more filters as desired
Click "Edit" to add more filters to your report.
12. When you've added all your filters, click "Save"
How to summarize a report with fields
Grouping (or summarizing) is great when you want to see the top-line numbers in a report. It's also useful when you want to answer specific questions about amounts or totals (for example: how many patrons do we have in Chicago?).
In this section, we'll cover...
As an example, let's look at how to summarize an Accounts report by the Primary City field.
1. Navigate to the Reports tab
If you don't see the Reports tab in the main tab bar, click on the App Launcher to access all tabs.
2. Find the report template you'd like to build your report from
Use the search bar to narrow your results. In this case, we'll start from the All Accounts report.
If you don't see "All Accounts" report, be sure to select the All Reports folder in the left sidebar.
Check out "Library of Useful Pre-Loaded Reports" for more information about what pre-loaded report templates come with ParonManager.
3. Click "Edit"
4. Before you do anything, click "Save As"
If you're working from one of our packaged report templates, click "Save As", and give the report a new name - this ensures you won't overwrite the original report template.
5. Fill in the report details and click "Save"
- Report Name: Give your report an appropriate, unique name
- Report Unique Name: This auto-fills based on the Report Name field
- Report Description: Briefly describe what the report will show, and how you'll use it - your colleagues and future you will be thankful
- Folder: File the report in a folder that makes sense
- Click "Save"
6. In the Groups section of the Outline panel, click on the "Add group..." field
7. You can either scroll through a list of available fields or type the field name to filter the list
8. Find the field you'd like to summarize by
9. Click "Run"
10. The report will be grouped by that field
Often, there will be a big group at the top of the report labeled "-". This is for all the records that have no value in the field you chose, and it's usually a sign that your data could use some cleaning up.
Let's take the Accounts report we've grouped by Primary City and add another grouping for Account Record Type.
This section gets pretty advanced! If you find yourself feeling lost, jump to the next section and come back to this later.
1. Click "Edit"
2. You'll notice there's now an option to Group Rows or to Group Columns after you've added your first grouping
3. Depending on how you want to see your groups, search for and click on the field you'd like to group in either the Group Rows of Group Columns field
This is what a report looks like when you add a second grouping by row. We can see that Primary City, our first grouping, is the overarching group by row, and then Account Record Type, our second row grouping, breaks the report down further by row:
This is what a report looks like when you group the second field by Column. In this example, we've chosen Account Record Type as our second grouping.
- In the top section, We can easily see the primary cities our patrons live, broken down further by Account Record Type.
- In the bottom section, we can see the detail rows for each Account.
There are a few ways to see a concice summary of numbers reflected in your report. In this part, we'll touch on the following:
- Hide the details on a summary report
- Add a chart to a report
- Resources about Dashboards
Hide details on a summary report
1. If all you care about is the total for each value, uncheck the "Details" box at the bottom of the report
2. That will give you a record count for each value
Add a chart to the summarized report
Charts are an excellent visual representation of the data shown in your report. The chart you add is based on the fields you summarize by.
Looks useful and fun, right? Learn more about the inner workings of adding a chart to a report directly from Salesforce - right here.
Now that you've learned how to group fields on a report, let's look at a few real-life examples of useful report groupings.
1. How many of my patrons have a billing address in each city?
Use the All Accounts report and summarize by Billing City.
2. How many of my patrons have opted into my email list?
Use a Contacts-based report and group and summarize by Email Status.
You'll see how many people have opted into your email list, how many have opted out, and how many bad (bounced) email addresses you have.
3. How many donations has an Account made? How much have they donated?
Any Donation report summarized by Account Name will tell you how many donations each Account has made, and the total amount of the donations they've made.
There are so many ways to summarize a report, and these are just a few to whet your palette. A great way to learn more is to start experimenting in your account and add some summarized fields to your own reports!
How to add, remove and organize field columns a report
In addition to filtering your report and grouping it by certain fields, you can also remove any unnecessary fields from the report, add fields to it, and organize the columns to suit your needs. Let's demonstrate these actions with a Contacts report we'll use to email our patrons
1. Navigate to the Reports tab
If you don't see the Reports tab in the main tab bar, click on the App Launcher to access all tabs.
2. Find the report in question
Use the search bar to narrow your results. In this case, we'll start from the All Confirmed Opt-in Contacts report template.
If you don't see the Confirmed Opt-In report, make sure you're in All Reports.
3. Click "Edit"
4. Before you do anything, click "Save As"
If you're working from one of our packaged report templates, click "Save As", and give the report a new name - this ensures you won't overwrite the original report template.
5. Fill in the report details and click "Save"
- Report Name: Give your report an appropriate, unique name
- Report Unique Name: This autofills based on the Report Name field
- Report Description: Briefly describe what the report will show, and how you'll use it - your colleagues and future you will be thankful
- Folder: File the report in a folder that makes sense
- Click "Save"
6. Now you can add, remove, or organize your columns:
To add a column: search and select the field you'd like to display in the report
To remove a column: click the "x" next to the field in the Columns section in the left panel
To organize the field columns: drag and drop the fields in the Columns section of the left panel
7. The report will update with your changes
