We have rebuilt reporting and improved record management

Reporting is important in any management system. We improved the general reporting across Bilby Management Software to make it easier to find the information you are interested in. This includes a tailored approach to each individual user!

How did we do reporting before?

In pre-bilby 13.1-beta, Reporting was opinionated and only showed a few fields from entities like Activities and Users. For example, when reporting on Users, you could only see a Users name, username, contact and tags. This felt like enough in early Bilby, but as our Partners spend more time in the system, it becomes inconvenient not being able to see more information.

It is clear that there are different roles in clubs, which means different jobs. We can then assume each admin Officer can have their own goal when browsing data.

Say an Officer was trying to get stats on how many users have registered over time, or someone wants to know which memberships are expiring this month, this became labour intensive with the limited data shown.

We did have basic filtering and sorting of records, but with most fields and relationships not available to filtering/sorting, the controls were not really providing high value.

What have we changed?

We have added new controls for filtering, viewing and sorting columns. To get a good quality report tailored to find exactly what you are looking for, we suggest configuring all 3 when performing specific reporting.

Improvements to how you view data

We have added controls to select which columns you want to see in your report. If an administrator is interested in seeing membership expiry, simply click on the columns button, and select which column you are interested in!

Administrators can also select the location of the columns with simple up/down buttons. Also when exporting data, the column selection will be retained in your exported report.

Improvements to record filtering

We spent some time working on the record filtering. As our system grows and matures, we want something that is also flexible and that will scale with upgrades. The new structure is great and has been incredibly flexible. We have found with filtering, once you get your head around the controls, it becomes easy to filter out irrelevant records and produce good quality reports.

The user controls can be a little intimidating at first, but we have found that after a couple of tries, they can become familiar and easy to use.

Improvments to record sorting

Bilby now exposes controls to sort by most fields on records. Administration officers can also specify direction of sorting and page size from 20, 50 or 100 records.

Can I save my reports that I have configured?

Unfortunately, Bilby does not have controls to save your reports right now, but this is only because we really want to nail this feature when we build it.

In a future version of Bilby, we think it would be really cool to be able to save your own reports with your configured filtering, sorting and columns. This would make it very quick to perform certain admin actions that you are used to doing day to day like Membership processing, Activity approval and general administration.

For now, we do have an interim solution which involves bookmarking your page once you have selected all your filters, sorting and columns.

I would love to take this one step further and allow our Partners to be able to expose their own data in lists to certain roles. That is all I will say about this feature for now!

Case studies using the new reporting controls

If you have made it this far, congratulations! We are going to deep dive into some case studies with our new reporting and if you are interested in learning some of the controls we recommend checking out the following articles.

1. Viewing activity data in Google Earth
2. Exporting user data to third party software like Mail Chimp