| |
What is a custom report?
WebCATS has more than 100 built-in reports. And even though they offer many options and do a great job of helping you organize your data, there may be times when you need to organize data in a way that WebCATS doesn't support. For example, you may love the built-in client address list report, but just wish that it was sorted a little bit differently, or included that ONE extra field—and then it would be exactly what you need.
That's where custom reports come in. Whether you want to make minor changes to an existing WebCATS report or create a brand new report that doesn’t resemble anything currently in WebCATS, you can do so using the custom report module. When designing your custom report, you get to determine what data will be included in the report. You also get to determine every aspect of report layout including sort order, column header names, and even font formatting.
Custom reports can be designed for the following record types:
- Client records
- Contact records
- Inquiry records
- Client activity records (counseling session, aware, milestone, investment, and any custom activity records you may have created)
- Narrative records
- Conference records
- Counselor records
WebCATS' custom report module is very powerful, but there are some
limitations, as outlined next:
- No custom calculations. You cannot apply custom calculations to column totals. For
example, you cannot specify that WebCATS provide you with the average
number of counseling hours for a grouping of records. Nor, for
example, can you ask
WebCATS to report how many of the those counseling sessions were held
at the client's site and how many were held at the center's site.
WebCATS, by default, does have intelligent totaling capabilities that
it will apply (e.g. total hours of counseling contact time or total
value of awards), but they vary from field to field and cannot be
influenced by the person designing the custom report.
- Only one primary sort field per custom report. When
establishing a primary sort criterion, you can only display one field
of data for that sort criterion. For example, if you decide to sort a
custom report by center name, only the center name can display for
each new record grouping. You could not choose to display both the
center name and center address, for example, or display the center
name, primary phone, and primary counselor.
- No summary reporting. WebCATS has many built-in reports that
allow you to summarize data at a high level. For example, you can run
the Summary of Counseling by Center report to see the total number of
sessions, contact hours, clients, etc. that were counseled per center,
without having to view a complete listing for each counseling
sessions. As of now, it is not possible to create a custom report that
summarizes data. Counseling session data would have to be listed out
in its entirety and sorted by center in order to get center totals.
- Primary contacts only. When creating a custom client or
client activity report, you can only include information for the
client's primary contact. Any other contacts listed for a client
record cannot be included.
- No record restricting capabilities. Custom reports, like the
majority of built-in reports, do not have the ability to narrow the group of records you are
reporting on based upon a characteristic they have in common (e.g. all
woman-owned businesses or counseling sessions that have at least 60
minutes of travel time). If you want to restrict a custom report's
output in this way, you must first create a subset,
and then run a built-in or custom report against that subset of
records.
For more information on custom reports, view our other popular resources on this topic:
|