Growing the business
Reports
Where analytics draws a picture, reports hand you the rows. A saved report is a question you have asked before; a scheduled one answers itself and emails you the result.
Where to find them
Reports in the account view.
Needs the permission report_templates.create (create report templates) and report_runs.download (download reports). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
What you can report on
- Waitlist visits
- Appointments
Bookings get their own report type, which is what makes this the right tool for a business that mostly takes appointments — unlike analytics, which counts waitlist visits only.
Date ranges
- Yesterday
- The last 7 days
- The last 30 days
- This month so far
- Last month
Ranges resolve when the report runs — the whole point of “last week” is that it moves. A report saved today and run next month covers next month's last week.
No range ever includes today
A report covering a day still in progress gives different numbers depending on when you ran it, which makes two copies of the same report disagree with neither of them wrong. Every range ends yesterday — so “this month so far” means up to and including yesterday.
Saving a report
A saved report keeps the question — the type, the range, the branches — so you can run it again without setting it up. Each run is kept too, so the history is there: a template is a question, a run is one answer to it, and the answers are the useful half.
Scheduling one
A saved report can run itself and arrive by email as a spreadsheet attachment.
- Only when I ask
- Every day
- Every week
- Every month
Timing
You pick the hour, and it is local to the shop. A report set for nine in the morning arrives at nine in the morning through a clock change rather than drifting to eight or ten, because scheduling works forward in local days rather than adding twenty-four hour blocks.
A failed run is not retried
A report is a snapshot of a window that has already closed, so re-running it produces the same numbers and a second email. Failures are recorded on the report's history instead — worth a glance if one you expected never arrived.
What arrives
A spreadsheet file, one row per visit or booking, that opens in anything. Reports go to the email address on the account and can be downloaded from the reports page as well — the emailed copy is a convenience, not the only copy.
What they are good for
- A weekly summary that turns up on Monday morning without anybody asking for it.
- Month-end numbers for the accounts, or for a landlord who charges on footfall.
- Getting the data out to work on somewhere else — a spreadsheet, your own reporting, an accountant.
- Keeping a copy before you close a branch or an account, since deleting either takes the history with it.
Getting the same data automatically
If you want visits in your own system continuously rather than as a weekly file, the API is the better tool.