1. Reporting Overview Business Goals Demystify the report menu
Understand what reports are for and when to use them
Technical Objectives
Understand how reports are structured
Understand what reports can do through various examples
Jobs by Salesperson, Sq Ft Installed by Month, Activities by Day of Week, Total Allocated Product,
Overdue Activities, Completed Installs, Installs by Phase
Learn how to create the simplest reports
[Show of hands – how many people have built a report before?]
In this training, I’d like to demystify reports – by the end, you’ll know what they’re for and how to use them.
I’ll explain how reports are structured and then I’ll show several examples.
You’ll learn how to create the simplest reports, but I’ll follow up with another training video to go further into the weeds with more complex examples

2. Making a Good Report is Hard
I won’t
bite …
Making a Good Report is Hard
Reports are hard to master … they’re very flexible and powerful, but that makes them more complex to understand and learn
Don’t hesitate to call us for help – but remember that it sometimes takes us a while to figure out difficult reports, too!
Reports are hard! They’re probably the hardest part of Moraware to master.
Be patient with yourself as you work through this material
… and be patient with us when you ask for help, too

3. What are you reporting on?
The hardest part is knowing what you want to report on! If you can’t describe what you’re trying to get out of the system, you won’t be able to make a report for it
Even then, you can only get out what you put in – to get the report you really want, you might have to change things like forms, activities, and phases to track more or different data.
When you call us for help with a report, the best thing you can do to prepare is think of the business problem you’re trying to solve. If you can describe that clearly, we can help tell you what you can or can’t do with JobTracker

4. Account Job Phase Activities Forms Files
Reports are just another way to get information out of JobTracker, just like Job views and calendar views – but they can do some things that other types of views can’t
Account views are about accounts. Job views are about jobs. Calendars are about activities …

5. Account Job Phase Activities Forms Files
Reports can work with all of these things: accounts, jobs, phases, forms, & activities

6. Every report either Counts or Adds
Even if you’re just trying to get a list, the report still has to count something – but it’s normal to have a report where each row has a count of 1.
While working on a report, always ask yourself,
“What am I counting or adding?”
It’s important to remember that every report is always counting or adding something.
If your goal is just to get a list of jobs, each row will still have a count of 1 – this might look “weird” at first, but it’s just how reports work.
So when you’re creating a report, always ask yourself: “What am I counting or adding?”

7. Basic Examples
Now for some examples

8. Jobs by Salesperson
Let’s start with a very simple report. Here’s one counting the number of jobs created this year, for each salesperson

9. Jobs by Salesperson
Just as with Job Views and Calendars, when you click Options on a report, it shows you how it was made
If you change the options, you change the report

10. Jobs by Salesperson (bar chart)
Here’s the same report, displayed as a barchart …

11. Jobs by Salesperson (bar chart)
All I had to do to get this was click Options and change the Display Type from Table to Bar Chart
I’ll talk a lot about the Options window in the next reporting video, but for now, I’m going to gloss over most details. Just know that to change a report, you click Options and “do something”
You can select any report and play around with the options. You won’t mess anyone up, because it won’t save until you click the Save Report button.

12. Jobs by Month
Here’s another report that counts jobs, but this time it’s grouping by month instead of salesperson

13. Jobs by Month
All I had to do to get this from my original report was change the Display Fields

14. Possibilities
Let’s look at some more examples of what you can do, but for now, I won’t dig into how they’re made at all – I just want to show the possibilities

15. Square Feet Installed Projected Completed
This report shows how you can total a numeric value from a form.
Most frequently, people want a report like this to show how many Square Feet they’ve installed or are going to install
Getting this report right is fairly complex – and it depends a lot on your forms and activities being set up correctly, too (and phases if you use them)
Completed

16. Overdue Activities
As I mentioned earlier, you can report directly on activities themselves – here’s a report showing overdue activities. As a manager, you’d probably want to view something like this every day … everyone should probably have this report and a couple of related reports
NOTE – you can create a Job View that tells you which Jobs have activities that are overdue … but this is easier to digest if you have a lot of activity types or if you use phases or processes

17. Installs by Phase
Phases are powerful, but they make everything more complicated.
You may have noticed that job views always show exactly one row per job, whether the jobs have phases or not. If you want to show one row per phase, you can do that with a report like this

18. Total Allocated Product
If you use JobTracker Inventory Edition, you can create some useful reports for that, too – I covered a couple of those reports briefly in the Inventory Training

19. Any report is Only as Good as Your Data
It’s important to do a sanity check on your data
Any report is only as good as your data, so now I’m going to show you how to do a sanity check on your data
[There was an 80’s movie – Real Genius – where the laser is reprogrammed with bad data to cause a massive jiffy pop popcorn to pop at the antagonist’s house … the military thinks the laser doesn’t work – it does, it just has BAD DATA]

20. Jobs by Salesperson Returning to the first example that I showed …
How do you know that this data is correct?

21. Sanity Check: Add More Detail
Jobs by Salesperson +Jobs
The answer is to show more detail …
Add columns so that you show more rows …
In this case, I’ve added the Job Name to my report which shows a lot more rows and makes it clear which ones don’t have the Salesperson set. It also lets me scan the other jobs and make sure that the Salesperson is correct.
Very often, you’ll want to save two versions of a report – the one you really want and the one you want + Job Name to show a lot more rows and let you do a sanity check

22. Getting Started
Time to dive in and start creating simple reports

23. Can create simplest reports with “New” …
You can create a simple report with Report > New
Go ahead and try it – you can pause the video, go to the Report menu, click New, and then choose the Display field that you want to count by

24. … but usually need to click Options
For more complex reports, you’ll then need to click Options. Again, here’s what it looks like if I hit options after creating a report counting Jobs by Job Salesperson

25. Quick Walkthrough Now I’ll show how to do it “live”
[Create Jobs by Salesperson in real time
Click Options and change to/from barchart
Click Options and change fields]

26. Exercise: Jobs by Account
Here’s a quick exercise to challenge you – see if you can create a report counting Jobs by Account. Pause the video to try it, and then I’ll show you the answer.
(pause)
Did you get it? OK, here’s how you do it. Account Name isn’t one of the options for Display Field when I choose Report > New. Not to fear, just hit OK and then click Options. Now remove this field and add Account Name.
Simple as that!
Try to create a report that counts the number of jobs created this year by each of your Accounts

27. Moraware makes CounterGo estimating software and JobTracker scheduling software for countertop fabricators. Since 2002 Moraware has helped fabricators quote and schedule more than 2 million countertop installations. Moraware is a member of the MIS+BSI: The Natural Stone Institute, the International Surface Fabricators Association (ISFA), and the Stone Fabricators Alliance (SFA).
Thanks for watching - If you want to learn more, be sure to follow up with the Advanced Report Training