Reports and dashboards

Numbers you can act on, and the two decisions behind them.

Your dashboards

Dashboard, at the top of the menu, is the page you land on after signing in. It opens on a greeting, the date and the two things most people came to do — New invoice and Add lead, each shown only to people allowed to — and then the panels.

A dashboard is a set of panels, and there are seventeen of them:

The period picker in the top right (This month to start with) governs every panel that covers a period; the ones that report a position — what is owed right now — deliberately ignore it. A panel with nothing to show is left out rather than drawn empty.

Several dashboards

You can keep several dashboards, each with its own name and its own panels — a Money one for the morning and a Delivery stand-up one for the stand-up, say, up to twelve. Once you have more than one, Dashboards in the top right switches between them; a pin marks the one that Opens first. Customise arranges the one you are looking at.

A plugin can add a panel of its own through the admin.dashboard.widgets filter; it is arranged, permission-checked and switched on and off exactly like the ones that ship. A panel that draws a chart says so with 'charts' => true, which is what decides whether the chart library is loaded at all — a dashboard of nothing but lists does not pay for it.

The reports

Organisation → Reports needs the Reports View permission; the CSV and Excel buttons need Export. A row of buttons across the top moves between the reports and carries the chosen period with you:

Two decisions worth knowing about

Tax deducted at source

The invoice summary splits tax three ways: the first tax on a line, the second tax where you charge two, and TDS — tax deducted at source, which the customer keeps back and pays to the revenue themselves.

A withholding rate is entered under Settings → Tax rates as a negative number, for example -10. It comes off the invoice total instead of being added to it, prints on its own line in the tax breakdown, and the report counts it as withheld rather than as tax charged. A business that does not withhold never has to think about it: the sample data ships one rate, switched off.

A customer's statement

Open a customer and press Statement, or use the Statement link beside them under Where it came from on the income report. It is the customer's account as a ledger: the balance brought forward when the period opened, every invoice, payment, refund and applied credit since, a running balance down the page, and the balance owing at the bottom. Choose the Period at the top; Print prints it. It needs the Reports View permission, and only opens for a customer you could open in the customer list.

The customer can open their own from Invoices → Statement in the portal — the same statement, from the same code, so a customer ringing up about their balance and the person answering are looking at one set of numbers.

Drafts and cancelled invoices never appear: neither is a claim on anybody. A credit note appears on the date it was applied to an invoice, not the date it was raised — an unapplied credit is money agreed to but not yet set against anything, and showing it would make the statement disagree with every invoice on it.

Periods

Every report shares one period picker — This month, Last month, This quarter, This year (where the reports start), Last year, Last 3 months, Last 6 months, Last 12 months, All time, or a Custom range. The last-few-months choices count back from the start of the current month, so they are always whole months. Comparisons with “the period before” use the calendar period before for this month, this quarter, this year and last year, and an equal number of days before for anything else.

The one exception is this year against last on the income report, which is always twelve calendar months either way. “Against last year” only means anything month against matching month, and a six-week window next to the six weeks a year earlier is a chart nobody can read.

Getting the numbers out

Every table has CSV and Excel beside it, and the income report has both at the top of the page. The file holds the same figures the table shows, for the same period, and is named after the report and its dates. CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Sheets, with the encoding set so accented characters and currency symbols survive. Excel is a real .xlsx workbook with a frozen heading row, dates as dates and money as numbers you can sum — written without a spreadsheet library, so there is nothing extra to keep patched.

Reports also print cleanly: use your browser's print command, or the Print button beside the period picker, and the navigation and the export buttons are dropped automatically.

Addresses on this page

For reference and for anyone scripting against the panel. Everything here needs somebody signed in to the workspace whose role allows it; anybody else is refused.