AvSight Helpful Tools—Working with Reports
This article will cover the basics of creating and editing reports in the AvSight system. In addition to this article, we strongly recommend reviewing the Salesforce Help articles and Trailhead modules as reporting is a very powerful tool. Help can be found within the Reports page by clicking the “?” at the upper right.
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/lex_implementation_reports_dashboards
Prerequisites:
None
AvSight stores a significant amount of data about a large number of items and transactions in many places throughout the application. Retrieving that data may at times seem to be a daunting task. Reports allow a user to retrieve the data they need in a format that is readable and useable in one spot. AvSight comes with several default reports, but provides the ability to create new custom reports as well as edit existing ones. Since many of the processes used in creating a custom report are used in editing existing reports, this article will focus on creating a new custom report.
Creating a custom report
Login to the AvSight system and navigate to Reports on the AvSight Menu. On narrower resolution screens you may need to select the More tab and choose Reports from the drop down list to open the Recent Reports page.
The menu on the left displays a list of report categories followed by a list of folders. Folders can be created as a way to store a group of reports for easy viewing. Favorites allows you to tag frequently used reports for quick access. Clicking on any of the selections in the left-hand menu will display a list of the reports in that category or folder.
To create a new report, select New Report from the Quick Links menu at the top of the page to open the New Report dialog box. Select the category of report you would like to create to display a list of report types within that category. Select the desired report type and click Continue to move to the report details screen. NOTE: you can also type a keyword in the search box to view report types associated with that keyword.
For this article, we’ll be creating a report to look at open RFQs by date, so type RFQ in the search box to view a list of reports that provide information regarding RFQs. We want information about RFQs and the vendor, so Select RFQs with Vendor from the list and click Continue.
The Report Details screen has several important navigational areas. Staring from the top left:
Outline/Filters these toggle to control the items that display on the left menu. Outline will display the columns and the grouping options.
Filters displays the list of filters applied to the report. Notice that the number of applied filters is displayed in a circle next to filters.
The large area on the right displays a preview of how the report will look when complete. The number of records displayed is limited and is for formatting purposes only. Running the report will display all of the rows that meet the report criteria.
Since the goal of our report is to monitor RFQ aging, we’ll need to add some information to the report. In order to see the age of the RFQ, we need to see when the RFQ was created. Click in the Add Column box and Select Create Date. It would also be nice to know who is assigned to the RFQ and when the last activity was recorded. Add the Assigned To and Last Activity Date columns. We’re only interested in open RFQs, so we need to add the Status column. By default the column is added to the end of the row of columns. The order of the columns can be changed in two ways. The first is by dragging the column name up or down in the list of columns on the left menu. The second is to drag the column left or right in the preview screen.
Those columns are sufficient to provide the data we need for our report, but there are some rows that we don’t need to see and some we want to see, but aren’t. Click on the Filters toggle to display the filters applied to the report. The Show Me filter is set to display My RFQs. However, we want to see all RFQs. Click on the Show Me filter to display the Edit dialog box. Clicking “X” will remove the filter completely and clicking in the Show Me box will allow you to choose other options. Select All RFQs and then click Apply. The Create Date filter also has options that will affect the data we see. Clicking in the Range box will display a list of date ranges to choose from. Since the purpose of this report is to look for any RFQs that have been active for a long time, we want to choose the All Time option. Select All Time and click apply. We also only want to see RFQs that have not been completed or cancelled. Add a filter for Status. Notice there that are several options to choose from. In the Operator field, choose Not Equal To and in the Value(s) field select Complete and Cancelled. The report will now show only RFQs that are not complete or cancelled. Click Apply to add the filter.
Report columns can also be sorted. To sort a column, click on the drop down in the column header in the preview screen and choose Ascending or Descending. We want the oldest at the top so choose Ascending for the Create Date column. It can also be helpful to group like data together. In this instance we’ll group our RFQs by Account Name in order to see how many RFQs for a given company are still open. Click the Outline toggle and click in the add group box to choose a column to group by—let’s group by Account Name. To see the full report and verify that it supplies the data we need, click Run in the Quick Links menu. Notice that much of the data now appears as hyperlinks. Clicking a hyperlinked item will take you to the details screen for that item. When finished editing, click Save from the Quick Links menu.
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