🧠Answering a question with a report
Somebody at a committee meeting has asked a question nobody can answer off the top of their head — how many social members have we got, who has done the most duties, what has the clubhouse cost us this year. This is the run from the question to the answer, and to having it ready next time.
?Look at what is already there
Reports → Report Library. Your club starts with twenty, grouped by subject. About half the questions a committee asks are already one of them, and running one takes a second.
One of them answers it → run it, export it, and you are done. | None of them does → carry on — one of them is probably nearly right. |
↓
2Start from the nearest one
Open whichever is closest and press Edit. Changing a report that mostly works is far quicker than building one from nothing, and it is how most reports actually get written.
↓
3Choose what a row means
A row is one record — one member, one booking, one payment. If the question is “how many” rather than “which”, put a field in Grouped by: a row then becomes a bucket, and every other column has to be a summary. That is the single decision that makes a report answer the question asked.
↓
4Add the columns somebody actually wants
Drag them across, or press the + beside one. Fields marked as linked come from a related record — a booking has one rink and one booker, so the rink name and the booker’s email are available on a bookings report.
↓
5Narrow it
Under Only rows where. Current members rather than everybody who has ever joined; this club year rather than all time. An unnarrowed report is usually right and useless.
↓
6Try it before you save it
The first fifty rows, nothing written. Read them — an empty report looks exactly like a fact, and “no payments this year” is a sentence somebody will repeat at a meeting.
↓
7Save it under a sensible name
Name it as the question, not as the data: “Who has done the most duties” rather than “Rota grouped by volunteer”. Use Save as if you started from an existing one and want to keep both. File it under a category so somebody else finds it.
↓
8If it will be asked every month, chart it
Add a chart in the builder, then Put on the dashboard. It appears on the admin dashboard and clicking it opens the report. Charts sit in panels of three; press the ＋ on a panel header for another panel, up to six.
💡 Tip: Exports come from the rows on the screen rather than a fresh run, so what you looked at is what you send. Take the CSV if it is going into a spreadsheet to be added up, and the PDF if it is going into a meeting to be read.