It's time to update Custom Reporting. I know you agree so let me have it.

Do we start with usability or is there core functions that we need to add?

Part of my struggle with reporting is how do we make it so you do not need to be a reporting or database expert to understand how the information is constructed. For example, an invoice has data that exists in three different tables. Invoice, Invoice Items, Payments.  We try to display these as best we can but in doing so we limit what you can report on and what you can use for a condition.

Do we need a default view where we give you the high level information and then have an advanced view where you need to know which tables to use and how to link them together?

What about calculations? I would like to have a way for you to add a field the results that is a calculated field such as Invoice.Date - Payment. PaymentDate so I can get a report of days since last payment without having to export many different reports and merge them in Excel (or some other tool outside of YM).

Let's start the conversation and I ensure you we are serious about updating this feature and will take any and all feedback into consideration. This will not change overnight or over a month but we first need to identify where the start. Maybe we improve it in stages but what do we tackle first? This is where you come in with your real-world scenarios and experience.

Hi Brian.

At the office we have started documenting FAC Office Visits - simply put, this mean we record a member's visit to our HQ in Tallahassee: date, time, purpose of visit, which member it was.

At the end of every month, our Legal Department requests for a YTD list of FAC Office Visits - this is one of the ways we gauge our member's engagement with the association, to see how often they come to the office and for what purpose.

There is an Activity Log we can download, but unfortunately, it doesn't provide more information about the visitor - all I have is their Website ID and their Name - so I have to pull a master from our database, and then use Excel functions to fill in the blanks for me so I can add their Professional Title, Organization, and contact information - just use the Website ID to match it and then retrieve the data I want from a specific column (or number of columns)..

If the Activity Log bucket is included as one of the table in the Custom Report Builder, then I would be SO golden. I would only have to create the report template once and all the information our Legal Counsel would need is going to appear there with no further manipulation on my end.

We could easily expand this report to document FAC Member Visits - as the opposite to see how often our team goes out to meet with our members.

This next comment doesn't have much to do with Custom Reporting but in the case of Activity Logs - if you try to update multiple records with a single Activity Log entry and you then you turn around and try to search records based on an Activity Log category, the result you get is Multiple Names - instead of the list of Members you assigned the activity log entry to - not very useful to me (or my end users) at all. If it spit out a full list like we wished it would, we would definitely be using it more for Administrative/record keeping purposes.

Oh man if custom reports could also do calculations, that would be AWESOME.

Oh My, the Activity Log. We store this as HTML and that is the current reason it doesn't fit into a reporting feature. Let me take this one as its own feature update and get that conversation started.

I appreciate that you want to keep the tool simple and easy to use but the fact is that it IS a complex tool and that means it requires *learning*.  You can't cater to people who are unwilling to learn.  

I'm not sure if this falls under the same "reporting" functionality that you are referring to but something we have on our wish list is for the dashboard to be able to reflect OUR data. We start taking memberships for the next year in October, so the Jan1-Dec 31 dashboard data is completely useless to us. It took me a long time to tell my colleagues "IGNORE the dashboard, it's not useful to us, just don't even look at it!". The numbers are completely off because of when we start memberships for the next year. We would love to be able to login and have a quick snapshot of our membership YTD (According to parameters that we choose).

If this isn't something that can be easily done, my next wish would be for us to hide the dashboard all together. It's just really misleading and hard to explain to a new member of the team that it's just not accurate. They don't understand why it's there in the first place if we cannot use the data.

If this dashboard area could be customization we would be so happy and would really use this site more than we currently are for specific member data.

Oops.  I hit Enter by accident.  *Having said the above*, there is room to improve anything, including the reporting tool.   I think table relationships need to be more understandable to users so reports can be built more easily.  It would also be terrific if we could move the order of the tables before joining.  Sometimes the table I want to add an outer-join to is too far down the list of tables and I can't access it so I can't report the way I want.  The different 'areas' of YM don't always overlap enough for complete reporting (Events/Store).  I often have reason to think to myself:  "The people at YM really don't have any idea how we use their platform."  One thing that would be awesome would be if the fields I add to a custom report added in the order selected.  So if I select (in this order) WebID, FName, LName, City; when the results render, they appear in that same order.  The drag-to-order column names is only better than nothing; it's slow and some days hardly works at all.  It is very awkward for reports with many fields.  Further to a recent request in the Idea box to be able to connect to the YM database through ODBC (or other connectivity) so that we could use a reporting tool like Crystal Reports with YM, this is a great idea because then we would have power over things like printing name badges the way we want, printing someone's event tickets all on one sheet, on demand, delivering output in a format other than a spreadsheet; reporting tools that allow formatting of the output are extremely empowering.  There are many enhancement requests you could forego if you put this ability into the hands of users.  Thanks for adding the ability to schedule reports.  I haven't tried it yet but I am excited about it.

To quote P. Kool, "One thing that would be awesome would be if the fields I add to a custom report added in the order selected. So if I select (in this order) WebID, FName, LName, City; when the results render, they appear in that same order." Something like this would be awesome for my association as well. While I have an easy enough time manipulating the columns once exported, we have more casual users who have a much harder time understanding it. They think, "A, B, C" and are thrown off when results come back, "A, D, C, B, E".

A request that has less to do with how the queries themselves are designed and more to do with accessing saved queries - a search feature at the top of the query page so I could type in a query name and be taken to it would be very useful. As it is, I have to page through all the queries because I'm not sure of where the alphabet breaks along the pages we have.

While I appreciate the effort at simplifying the experience for casual users, I think doing so hamstrings users who are willing and able to get into it a little more. I can help my casual users if you'll help (allow) me to build the more complex queries.

1. Agreed - have the fields in the order they are selected/ enable customization of the dashboard/search box for queries
2. Agreed - activity log reporting. Also enable the system recording of admin actions. Sometimes admins make incorrect changes to the records and we need to check for these errors. Or just to have a record of member record changes
3. Event tracking - we need to be able to bulk email members who attended the event in the past but has not registered for the upcoming event. I believe right now we need to export 2 separate queries and scrub the excel data. We need ability to export "has registered x,y,z event names" but not "W event name". The "but not" is the complicated part.
4. calculated fields - yeah!!!
5. pivoted data - e.g. ability to publish the link to send total count of each primary group according to member type
6. simplify the member history search. We need to report the new members to our board and the member history query is complicated often giving rise to multiple duplicate records.
7. Is it possible to make smart queries e.g. if preferred mailing address custom field = business it'll populate the address from "employer" instead of "home"
thanks for looking into improving the custom reporting.

Like others, I strongly second this. A few additional thoughts:

1. Forgetting the reports module itself for a moment, it would be extremely helpful to have the "Saved Queries & Reports" page (/admin/saved_queries.asp) default to a list of "favorite" reports, customized for each user. I imagine I'm not the only one who uses just a handful of reports on a regular basis, and it's annoying to have to go hunting for them every time.
2. Rather than breaking down fields by high/low level, have a "basics" category that includes basic contact and membership information (names, address, types, expiration date, etc) and have this category at the top of the field selection menu. I'm sure everyone will disagree around the edges about what should be included here, but I'd imagine there'd be a strong consensus on the core.
3. I find it counter-intuitive to select fields to export before I select the criteria to search by. These should be reversed.
   

Hi Rebecca,

Customizable Dashboard Tiles is a project owned by my awesome teammate Jay Bope.  We agree this is a great enhancement idea and Jay has started creating the requirements and what options will be available to the site admin.  I will coordinate with him on what we want to show as a teaser. Check back for an update. It will most likely be teased in The Inside Story blog that our support guru, Chelsey, posts every Monday. Thanks for the feedback.