Sneak Peek : Reporting

This is an exciting time for Spider Strategies, over the next few weeks we’ll be giving sneak peeks into new functionality we’re developing. In this feature we’ll take a brief look at reporting, what it currently is, and how we’re going to improve it.

One of the reasons why all software is built is because there exists a need to have a problem solved that is either too time consuming or complex to have people solve them manually. However, building software to run these long and complex processes are only half of what makes an application useful, the other half is reporting the data to users in a format they can understand and find useful. Our Corporate Management Suite application has always excelled in its ability to solve the problem of grading and tracking performance, however its reporting capabilities has needed some improvement in order to make it easier for users to get the information they need from the application.

One of the key enhancements we’re implementing for reporting is the ability for users to generate customized reports. The biggest benefit of this enhancement lies in the flexibility users will have in defining these reports. Previous reporting capabilities forced users to defined search terms against a limited set of filters and also limited what type of data should be shown in the results of the report.

This screenshot above shows one of the reports currently available in CMS. It is an owner/updater report, and it highlights the rigidness of our current reporting capabilities. The user is restricted in what they can search for as well as in specifying what should be contained in the results. While this created some specific reports that were useful, it was too limited to provide all the type of reports that we saw organizations both needed and wanted. Our new custom reporting aims to solve this inflexibility by allowing user to add any number of filters as they see fit. It also allows them to choose what part of the data they would like to see returned in the report. The screenshot below shows off some of our new custom reporting interface, note the ability to add filters and choose what should be shown in the results

In addition to generating these reports, users will have to ability to bookmark their report to their dashboard for convenience, as well as print and export their results to Microsoft Word and Excel documents. As a side benefit to the implementation of our new custom reports, we’ll be also including many more pre-define standard reports that users can choose from. We hope by being able to offer users the power and flexibility to define their own reports they will find it much easier to find the data they are looking for.