Reports

Please note that this page is currently under construction. There is more information to come.

Overview

The SmartSimple reporting system is an integral of our business operating system.

A report allows you to manipulate both the contents and the presentation of the data contained in one or more of the SmartSimple tables; unlike a table, reports present only the data that meets the criteria you define. They also have the ability to aggregate and display summary information. 

Reports provide the following features: 

• No additional buying or installation of software
• All creation functionality available within the standard interface
• Viewable from any browser 
• Accessible via Microsoft Word or Excel with the appropriate SmartSimple plug-in 

Benefits of Reports: 

• Display data from one or more tables in one place
• Group-aggregate data from one or more table
• Display the grouped data in a variety of different types of graphs
• Export the data into any file format that you wish OR 
• Designate Internet-enabling so that the reports can be linked to public websites 
• Group reports together as tabs, allowing similar topic-based reports to be found together
• Copy and modify built-in reports as the basis of your customized reports 

User Role-based security defines who can view the reports that you create from your system.

 You must be a user with SysAdmin privileges in order to create reports from your SmartSimple system. 

Report Components

You will encounter three major components in the reporting system: 

• Reports that are created from underlying SmartSimple database tables - you can connect the required tables to generate a report
• Graphs that you create yourself. These are based on existing reports and are used to display the report in a graphic format. 
• Dashboards that will display multiple charts on a single page

The following diagram shows the relationship between these three types of entities:

Charts

Charts are used to display the information from a report in an easy-to-read “graphic” format.

• You can create pie charts, bar charts, line charts, and table-type charts.
• You can create more than one chart type of each report and when displaying a report, choose from any of the charts associated with the report.
• Generally, you will choose a “summary” type report as the basis for the chart, as that type of information is more meaningful when displayed in this manner.

A [wiki/User user] can only access the chart if they have permission to see the report the chart is based on.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a single page view of a set of charts.

• When the user displays the dashboard, each report referenced by each chart is processed, and the current data is displayed in charts that are displayed on the dashboard.
• You can create multiple dashboards to show different sets of key indicators.
• A user can indicate that a specific dashboard should be their home page within SmartSimple, giving them an immediate view of key information from the system when they first log in.
• Each dashboard needs to be permissioned to the roles you wish to be able to see the dashboard.

Tables

In order to make the creation of reports a little simpler, some of the SmartSimple tables are presented in a denormalized format when using the Report Builder.

For example, the contact record does not contain the company name; these two tables are linked at the database level through the CompanyID field. So contact table does not contain the company name field but rather a key field that links to the company table.

But when you use the contact table within the Report Builder it will display a field Company Name. This means that you can use this field without needing to link the two tables together.

Configuration - Essentials

Accessing Reports

A user who is permissioned for report use can access the reports available to them. Follow these steps to access reports in your SmartSimple system: 

1. Click the 9-square menu icon on the top right of your page.

 

2. Under the heading Tools, select Reports. 

The list view of available system reports will be displayed.