Reports, dashboards and printing

There are three levels of producing a report in the system, and most questions are answered at the lowest level, without writing any code.

Level 1 — the list itself

Filtering and grouping a list screen is very often exactly the report you are looking for. And it is live: when the data changes, the report changes.

Next to the list views there are three more views that show the same data in other ways:

• Pivot — a summary table broken down by rows and columns; dimensions are changed by dragging.
• Graph — bar, line, pie.
• Cohort / calendar / kanban — depending on the model.

Level 2 — dashboards

Dashboards gather the company's pulse on one screen and are management's common language. Most of a weekly meeting is spent collecting figures: sales bring their spreadsheet, finance its report, and the first argument is about which number is right. A dashboard ends that argument: everyone looks at the same live, defined number.

The PORTWARE Dashboards app ships ready dashboards from sales to cash, field service to PLM, AI usage to the executive cockpit. The Executive overview, for example, compares invoiced revenue, confirmed sales, purchases, cash, receivables, overdue receivables, payables and open pipeline with the same period last year.

Read a dashboard with four questions:

1. What is happening? — the figure on the KPI cards.

2. Is it good or bad? — the comparison; a change in the good direction is green, and the widget says so in words.

3. Why? — smart insights and the "why did it change" breakdown.

4. What now? — click a figure, a bar or a row; the records behind it open and the work is done from there.

The bar on top holds the period, the comparison, "everyone / only me" and the dashboard's own filters. Every widget reads with your permissions; two people looking at the same dashboard with different rights see different figures. Add to dashboard, in the gear menu of every list, graph and pivot screen, turns that screen into a widget as it is; the whole dashboard exports to a formatted Excel workbook, runs in presentation mode and can be mailed on a schedule. Cowork opens beside a dashboard knowing it, and builds a new one from one sentence.

Details: the Dashboards module page.

Level 3 — the spreadsheet and custom reports

For more complex analysis a spreadsheet can be used; live cells linked to the data in the system can be built. Needs beyond that (custom calculations, a custom layout) call for report development; ask your system administrator.

Cowork is a report source too: it can read data from the system and pour it into a Word or presentation file. Chapter 14 has examples.

Printed documents

Documents such as the quotation, order confirmation, invoice, delivery note and work order are produced as PDF. Their layout is not arbitrary:

• The company's own header layout is used: three logos, a terms table and a company-specific page format.
• The same template serves more than one company identity; logos, IBANs and terms change with the company you print from.
• The page format (margins, scale) comes with the layout; a page format set up separately breaks the layout.

The right way to share a report

In order of preference:

1. Give the person access to the system and send the link of the saved filter. The report always stays up to date.

2. If you cannot give access, print a PDF. The document carries the truth of the moment it was printed and bears the company identity.

3. If analysis is needed, export to Excel — knowing that this is now an uncontrolled copy outside the system.