Planning with CiviReport
This chapter explains some key ideas that are useful when planning your use of CiviReport. It should be read by system administrators before they start to configure CiviReport for daily use. It will also be useful for anyone who wants to better understand the thinking behind CiviReport. Skip this chapter if you just want to look at specific reports that have already been configured by your administrator!
When to use CiviReport
CiviReport grew out of the need for users to be able to easily display complex information about their data, and to display answers to questions about this information in accessible ways. It is useful when you need to repeatedly ask the same question, or a set of similar questions, about your data.
CiviReport can be used as a management tool in organisational planning and as an analysis tool for membership or donor development. Tabular or graphical output can be produced and set up to email reports to specific people according to a schedule.
CiviReport might be overkill if you want to quickly find a set of contacts that match a certain criteria. In this case you might consider using one of CiviCRM's search tools.
What reports are available?
When you think about it, the number of questions a non-profit might want to ask about their data is pretty much infinite. The CiviCRM approach to solving this problem (which is a familiar CiviCRM approach) is to aim to cater for 90% of the scenarios and allow the system to be easily extendable by administrators and developers to cover the last 10%.
Reports often come in pairs: one showing a summary and the other showing the detail. These reports can be linked, allowing users to see information at a glance with the option to drill down in a certain report for more detail.
We haven't included all the reports available in CiviCRM here because the list is constantly growing. For a complete list of reports available in your version, along with an explanation how the reports can be used, look at the page 'Create reports from templates' (in the Reports dropdown menu).
Report templates and report instances
Two key concepts in CiviReport are report templates and report instances. A report template is the base for creating a report instance. In other words, you can generate any number of report instances from one report template. For example, the Top Donors Report template is used to show those people who have given most to your organisation. An instance of this report might show the top 10 donors that have given to your organisation this year-to-date.
Report vs. Search
CiviCRM has inbuilt search functionality that covers most scenarios, so it's important to know when to use a report and when to search. The current report interface does not support most common batch actions such as "Update via Batch Profile," "Smart Group" creation, etc. This means that if you want to perform any action against a result set, it is better to use search rather than report.