Author Topic: Please submit your reporting needs here? (Read 4450 times)

alfred_nutile · March 09, 2009, 10:44:16 am

I have a few clients now and potential requesting more reports needs for contributions.
I think there are a good solid set of reports that should be included.
With drupal 6 and views 2 this really is not too hard, it comes down to time really.
Especially now there is the views addition to drupal from civicrm.
So I was going to spend a week just on this (next week or the week after)
I did a report for our own task tracking system using
http://www.fusioncharts.com/
and the above tools, and only 10 links of php code.
(it was easier for me then google, openflash, jgraphs)
So if there was a list of say 5-10 key reports that should be included I would like to spend time making a module for drupal that makes this happen.
Yes for drupal. Sorry that is what I know and for time reasons I would have to focus on that.
If people would like to post their ideas on a good report for contributions and or 'bump' and existing suggestion I can then see that results and start next week or so on the project.
Thanks

petednz · March 09, 2009, 12:03:49 pm

Nice offer - good luck - will put the thinking cap on.

kgilnack · March 09, 2009, 02:02:50 pm

Alfred, I'm so glad to see someone taking this on as the report function is critical from a user perspective - and something we've been struggling with.

For organizations that need to deal primarilly with organizations or households, it would be very useful to identify an individual in a relationship with that employer/household as the Head of Household/CEO/Primary Point of Contact.

It would also be helpful to have a report that allows us to search based on activity OR lack there of (ex: CEOs of member organizations that have not renewed this year and have not received a phone call or had a meeting with anyone on staff yet for making membership renewal phone calls).

It would also be useful to have a report for looking up all activities that all employees/household members have participated in from a given organization/household (ex: "Member Benefits report" for assessing how an organizational member of a trade association is using their discount through staff participation in trainings, subscriptions, etc).

I would also like to be able to look-up people by job titles with wildcards (ex: *hr* OR *Human resource* OR etc..).

For community organizers I think a report for generating walk sheets would be useful - especially if you can integrate Google Maps.

I'm just spitballing here because thus far we've only been using Advanced Search to pull up info as needed and are working on installing BIRT, so I'm not sure if the reports above might already be easy through views or Search Builder. However, a more user-friendly interface like Access Query builder and/or some report templates would go a long way to making CiviCRM more useful for non-coders just trying to get started. I will also put my thinking cap on and try to hone in on the reports we really need around here and used to easily access from past databases.

petednz · March 09, 2009, 02:25:39 pm

Interesting list, but I understood Alfred was focussing on extension with regard to CiviContributem- just to help avoid this turning in to a 'wishlist' that goes way beyond his focus ;-)

alfred_nutile · March 09, 2009, 04:00:10 pm

It is an interesting list

but for now peterd is correct.
Contributions and think graphs

kgilnack · March 09, 2009, 10:23:14 pm

I clearly should have read the initial post more closely - sorry to bring things off track. Nothing immediately comes to mind regarding CiviContribute needs at our organization, but I am looking forward to seeing what reports result.

alfred_nutile · April 04, 2009, 03:31:27 am

Still working on it.
Drupal has a module for openfusion charts.
Trying to get the time to give this more of a go.
Looks good though now that the data is in Views.

Donald Lobo · April 04, 2009, 07:01:14 am

might also want to check and catch up on:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviReport+-+The+Return

lobo

nkinkade · April 10, 2009, 05:37:43 pm

CiviReport looks useful, but having to set your data in some predefined template seems limiting to me for certain things. It seems that CiviReport would be most useful for tabular data that can be iterated over and laid out in rows. Basically for data returned by a single query. But what about a report that contains data from 10 different queries and laid out in some custom way?

I've just written a PHP script which interacts directly with the database because what we need is a whole cluster/summary of semi-unrelated data, and not laid out in rows (at least not all of it).

How does this idea strike people: something like a report builder that would offer a good handful of predefined values (call them tokens) that could be laid out arbitrarily as HTML. An ultra simplistic example might look like:

=====
<html>
<title>Title</title>
<body>
<h2>My custom report</h2>
Total donations this year: {$ytd_donations year=curr_year}
Total donations last year: {$ytd_donations year=last_year}
Difference: {($ytd_donations year=curr_year) - ($ytd_donations year=last_year)}

First time donors this year: <strong>{$new_donors year=curr_year}</strong>

</body>
</html>
=====

Basically something that is akin to Smarty templates, but with access to a bunch of the most common *types* of data people want to know like:

YTD donations
MTD donations
YTD donor count
MTD donor count
YTD donations for a particular contribution page
etc. ...

It would require someone to know how to write basic pages in HTML and to teach themselves some very simplistic syntax for the report builder.

Is this a worthless idea? Already done somewhere? Not feasible?

Comments welcome. I'm thinking about trying to write something like this, but don't want to waste time or duplicate efforts.

Thanks,

Nathan

Donald Lobo · April 10, 2009, 10:31:13 pm

I dont think the yet to-be-built CiviReport interface will constrain the data to be of specific format. I think we will have quite a few helper functions for summary/tabular/matrix type displays (the common type of reporting displays).

I think the interface should be flexible enough to accomodate your needs below. Do you want to write a report specification on the wiki, this will help us validate the interface that we'd like reporting classes to adhre to

lobo

aaca · September 02, 2009, 02:12:50 pm

CiviReport will likely be one of the most powerful tools we are looking for from the CiviCRM suit. The most anticipated update for me would be integration of custom fields for CiviReport, not just for contribution but for any reporting needs.

Donald Lobo · September 02, 2009, 02:54:34 pm

you can include any fields including custom fields in a report. You'll need to write your own custom report for this (there are examples). Would make a great community contribution

lobo

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Author Topic: Please submit your reporting needs here? (Read 4450 times)

alfred_nutile

Please submit your reporting needs here?

petednz

Re: Please submit your reporting needs here?

kgilnack

Re: Please submit your reporting needs here?

petednz

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alfred_nutile

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kgilnack

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alfred_nutile

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Donald Lobo

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nkinkade

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Donald Lobo

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aaca

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Donald Lobo

Re: Please submit your reporting needs here?