14 Dec 2023 | Windward Software
Cracking the Code: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Custom Reports
This webinar focused on customizing reports, different tools and filters within Windward System Five. Three specific reports were discussed in detail: the invoice report, design inventory report, and customer and supplier report.
- The webinar started with a brief introduction about the topic and the presenters, Scott Rockin and Robert Clark.
- Scott presented a tutorial on customizing the reporting in system five. He introduced a tool that allows users to add fields to grids in system five, which can be used for customizing reports.
- Scott highlighted three specific reports: the invoice report, design inventory report, and customer and supplier report. He demonstrated how to use these reports, the different features, and how to customize them.
- The Invoice report can be used to track sales within a certain timeframe. It provides a lot of detail about sales and can be customized to include different details like commission lines, delivery dates, etc.
- The Design Inventory report allows users to view different information about their stock. It can be used to track oversold items, filter items based on lookup words, and can be saved for later use.
- The Customer and Supplier report can be used for marketing purposes. It can be customized to include various details about customers and can be exported to Excel for use with other programs.
- Robert Clark talked about Windward Intelligence, an integration with Microsoft Power BI. This tool can pull information from the database and present it in customized reports. It can be used to create reports that are not available in Windward, or merge information from different reports.
- Users can get custom reports with the purchase of Windward Intelligence.
0:07
All right. Welcome, everybody, to the year end webinar series. This is actually the last in the series.
0:12
This one is called Cracking the Code: A Step by Step Guide to Creating Your own Custom Reports.
0:18
And this one is presented by Scott Rockin and a little bit later in the webinar.
0:24
We're also going to have Robert Clark in talking about Windward Intelligence reporting. So, this is going to be a pretty special show today.
0:35
And, again, we have been doing this for a little bit. With one little mistake on our slide here, it says today, but today is December 14th and we're going over the cracking the code, but these are all the topics that we covered. And all of the ones from the Pastor already uploaded to our webinar archives, which is located at windward software dot com slash webinars. There's actually a little button there that says, View the Webinar Archives or something along those lines. You click there and get to any of the recordings.
1:07
And before we start, we want to just tell you about a coupon that we have going on right now, 10% off, any of the professional services that you could use in your business to get things done a little bit more efficiently.
1:20
Um, there's a promo code.
1:24
Your dash N dash 23, that auto twice.
1:28
And some of you here today are probably here wondering about reporting, and we want you to consider the reporting plan.
1:36
If you're watching this webinar, I'd be perfect for you.
1:38
You'll receive some assistance and best practices for inventory reports, customer reports, invoice reports, customer ledger reports.
1:47
And after today's webinar, we're going to set an additional 10% live, if you use the promo code webinar, when you check out.
1:59
All right, we're gonna move this on over to Scott. He's gonna start presenting about the custom reporting today.
2:06
Thank you, Kyle.
2:08
Let me just flip the screen over to Nice Krane.
2:18
And I think we're seeing my screen now. Yeah, OK.
2:26
Thank you for coming, everyone, to our last presentation of the year.
2:29
Today, we're going to go over different ways you can customize the reporting in system five.
2:35
And, in some cases, customize, just the screening, system five, to get more out of the reporting than what you see if it's been installed out of the box.
2:44
A lot of these little tips and tricks we're going to go through today can be missing your initial implementation. Or just aren't top of mind. Because we're trying to get you running the system, as opposed to reporting on the data. And can really help you take a report. That is almost what you need And make it what you need.
3:03
And as Kyle mentioned near the end of the webinar, my colleague, Robert Clark is going to join us.
3:07
And Roberts become a Good resource, and a little bit of our resident expert on Winward Intelligence. So he's going to give us a little bit of a chat on how he's been using it with customers and how he's been working with it. And a little bit about what's possible. So.
3:25
First, I'm gonna go through a little trick that helps you with the grids in system five. So specifically, the invoice grid, maybe the purchase order grid, and a lot of the reports and how you can add fields to them.
3:40
Then we're going to talk about three specific reports, just a little warning here, to get through all of these reports and show you what's possible. I won't be able to go too in depth on anything specifically.
3:54
So we'll jump through a lot of different areas here and what I'm going to encourage you to do is take these three reports and consider playing around with them and customizing them until you get the report you've been looking for.
4:10
The first thing we're gonna go through here is, well, and here's why: I think we do this often, it winward, and we come up with KPIs or key performance indicators.
4:21
And finding the right report to track your vital business statistics is a lot like tracking your blood pressure or something like that. If you want your business, you want to know how successful you're being, of course, you need the reports to make great decisions. And some of these reports, you just need one extra field to make that happen.
4:41
The first report we're going to talk about is there's really every invoice.
4:47
So how you can customize the grid.
4:51
So I'm gonna open up Windward and I'm going to edit a transaction.
4:57
And, oh, let's pick.
5:02
Something with a little bit of, I'll pick this work order for Smith construction.
5:10
And you'll see that I've customized it a little bit right away.
5:14
So, two things that I've done was in my particular fictional business.
5:19
I have a situation where I often special order order products for customers direct, and I want to keep an eye on the margin in case maybe I'm paying more for that product on this particular order than I normally do.
5:33
So, I've added the margin field between the price and the total.
5:38
Also, when I'm shipping things to Smith Construction, I often have to not just know what the customer ordered and what I've ship them, but know what I've staged for delivery, what's ready to be shipped.
5:51
So I've added a column where I can add some text to each line to indicate, Oh, is that prepared, or do I need to prepare that?
6:02
So, there's a lot of things you can do.
6:03
These are two examples to customize a grid.
6:08
And I'd like you to keep in mind that most places in Winward, not all, but most places where there's a grid like this, you can do what I'm showing you.
6:16
And there is a great resource in the Customer Care portal, a good solution article about this.
6:22
You right click in the grid and hit this Customize button.
6:28
Now, although this isn't a report, it adds more information to every transaction.
6:35
And what you do is you find the piece of information that you want to add.
6:41
So perhaps, maybe I want the discount percentage visible on screen at all times.
6:46
I choose that.
6:48
And I hit show column.
6:52
And then, this part's a little counter-intuitive.
6:55
You have to switch away from the current user to a different user, and then it saves the settings for the current user.
7:02
So, if you're looking to do this for everyone, you want to start up here at All users, pick something like pack size, hit Show Column, and flip to a different user.
7:18
And that will customize the grid.
7:20
Sometimes it takes you a couple of swings at it to get it right.
7:23
You can also move it around in the list like that, to create a user interface that's more suitable for your business specifically.
7:35
You can also color code the columns, change the fonts and change the actual words that are here.
7:44
To create a user interface that is more useful when it comes to invoices or POs.
7:51
And this is also something we'll use in some of the custom reporting. I'll go through, some of the reports, have the same feature, and there's 10 fields that aren't on the report until you add them.
8:05
I see your question there, Mike, thanks for the question.
8:07
So, Mike's asking, is there something that explains what the different columns do, not, in particular?
8:14
And it depends on the, it depends on the report you're using. So, in some cases, that probably is Mike. In some cases, they're probably, it's a little hard to find that information.
8:28
There are a lot of topics to cover, so I apologize for the fast pace of this webinar, But the idea is it'll give you some things to try and play around with.
8:40
The first report we're going to look into.
8:45
Is the invoice report.
8:46
If you're looking to report on the sales in a given timeframe, or even the sales that were written in a given timeframe, This report is very powerful. People use it for all sorts of different purposes.
9:04
To find the invoice report, go to Reports, Sales Reports, and it's down here under Customer and Invoice Reports.
9:16
And there it is, right there.
9:18
Oops. Let me save that show that, again. Invoice report.
9:22
Soon as you open the invoice report, what you'll notice is that there's a ton of toggles.
9:26
So, to start off, before you even get into customizing it in an in-depth way, you can pick all these different options to report on different types of sales.
9:36
So, for example, some customers want to know some Windward customer.
9:41
Some of you ask me, well, I want to know not just what business I have completed.
9:46
So not just my accounts receivable but I want to know what I've written. So, what people have agreed to purchase that I might still have on order during a timeframe.
9:55
Because it helps me know how business is actually going.
10:00
So if I include work orders, that makes the invoice report more like a sales that have been written report, or some people just call it a written sales report.
10:13
You can also show things like profit analysis or invoice lines specifically, write on the report, if you prefer, or take them out for less detail.
10:27
So, this can very quickly become a report that shows you a lot of data.
10:34
Maybe too much in some cases about what's gone on in the invoicing side or the sales side of things.
10:40
And in this report on top of the toggles, you can also right click, You guessed it, customize the grid.
10:48
So, to go back to your question there, Mike, there's a lot of these little areas.
10:53
Most of them are fairly self explanatory, but not at all types. So, maybe the PO number is important.
11:02
And I can add that.
11:06
Oh, in regards to this specific report.
11:11
I have found, with customers before, that these dates or invoice dates can be quite helpful. For example, if you have a business process where you always write an estimate first, you flip it to a work order when the customer agrees to buy. And, of course, flip it to an accounts receivable when you deliver.
11:28
Then you can see how long it takes you for given customers to take it from an estimate or a quarter.
11:35
You can look at your delivery information here if you don't, like using the regular delivery interface.
11:42
I've seen people use this report in a simpler way, where they take off.
11:48
These details view them.
11:51
Whoops.
11:57
And it just turns into a sales report, really. Like, this is what I ran. This is cool, bought stuff for me.
12:03
Some people look at that in a Daily Report.
12:07
And the report can be filtered by lookup words, if you'd like to exclude or include different information.
12:15
So maybe you have certain invoices that are you want to include Or exclude You can add lookup words to them to filter them in or out.
12:26
You can do the same with customers. So you can filter groups of customers.
12:32
You can add that freeform columns that you've created buy the invoice level or the line level.
12:41
And so there's a lot of tweaking and customizing can do with this report.
12:52
Also, once you build it the way that you like it, you can save a copy. So that you don't have to rebuild it every time.
13:01
This invoice report, very powerful tool, and I think usually, with most clients that I implement, if they're looking for a sales report, this is one of my first stops, because it just gives them so many options.
13:17
And here's an example of.
13:22
I should say, let's, let's try and save one, Shelly.
13:24
So, let's and that.
13:30
And if I hit Save here.
13:34
That's what saving it looks like.
13:42
So now, it's available in the list.
13:49
So that's the invoice report, and there's a lot of cool things you can do with it.
13:55
I guess the most common things that I've seen people add our Commission lines, delivery dates, PO, numbers, things like that.
14:13
So if you're looking for the sales report, try the invoice report.
14:16
Lots of lots of information about what's going on in business.
14:23
The second report we're going to touch on today is the Design Inventory Report on, and I'm maybe I'm overstepping here, but I think this is one of the most powerful reports in our software because of its versatility.
14:34
And you can view all kinds of things about your stock by building this report out in different ways.
14:43
And again, you can save your settings and keep the report for later use. one thing that came up in our other webinars, which I will touch on today is how to use the report to report on oversold.
14:57
And another thing that is commonly used is the use of a lookup word, which I'll touch on again here.
15:09
So if you're not familiar with it, this is where you find this report.
15:13
Go to Inventory and Purchases Inventory Reports, and here at the top, you'll see Print Inventory Reports.
15:22
So once you save a report, Elli, available here, for later use.
15:27
If you want to design a new one, which is what I'll do now, you click Design.
15:36
And here's the interface. There are so many toggles and options here. I could probably do a whole webinar just on just on this report. But we're going to go through some of the basics and most frequently used ones that I see with customers.
15:50
So first thing that came up in one of our previous webinars about counting was, how do I find my oversold if I want to isolate my oversold?
15:59
How do I do that? And this toggle right here can help you with that.
16:03
So if I list only oversold right there as a filter right out of the gate it will only show me the oversoul product which can be very handy.
16:13
So keep that in mind when we get to a later step what if I only lift lift my oversold?
16:19
I suspect I cleared my oversold's in the last webinar. So I may not be able to demonstrate that.
16:27
Here you can filter by category and that think pretty much speaks for itself. But you can also do a range of categories.
16:36
So you just pick what you're reporting on. Which supplier you're reporting on, take that out for now, or brand.
16:44
And then although I have not used a lot of these filters, because they're quite specific, you can report on specific location codes, price, ranges, descriptions, park numbers, all sorts of different things from here that can customize the report to your needs.
17:04
Also this options' area, I'll point out a couple of things on here that you may want to consider. But for example, if you're reporting on serial numbers, you'll want to take that.
17:16
If you are reporting on say barcodes because you are trying to barcode the product, that's not barcoded.
17:23
You want to click this.
17:29
This one's good for oversold.
17:32
Then you'll see some here lists part's not sold or not purchased And what this will do is it'll line you up to create a date range filter Parts not sold in a date range filter, Which changes it into our report? that can be filtered by date.
17:50
No matter which filters and options you choose.
17:52
You can then choose which information about the products or services on the report that you want to see.
17:59
So I've got some basic detail here Because it's often the case that people want to export This report to Excel for other purposes.
18:08
I usually recommend, just in case you want to load anything back into the software, to always have these two on there, category, part number.
18:16
I've got some very basic information about my products here.
18:20
You can see there's quite a number of different things I can pull about the products in this list, All my different price levels, quantity discounts, and so on.
18:33
But if you want to make it into a sales report, you can also go down here, and this is the month to date Sales 4, 0 is the current month, -4 is four months ago.
18:43
I can create a sales report, or I can see my stock aging.
18:51
And some of these are just like that last tab where if I put a range, if it says range here, that means it's going to let me define the range later. So here I'm just going to put one of those on.
19:11
This will let me define a range of dates.
19:17
So, I can do lots of things. And here, I'll just whip up this report really quick.
19:22
Like, did I filter too much on here?
19:26
It's probably the date range.
19:34
What am I missing?
19:43
Got myself in trouble already.
19:59
Is there a category filter or you've got no subcategory?
20:02
Yeah, let's go up. Here you go.
20:04
Thanks Rob.
20:05
Alright so let's put some of these ranges on so you can see how that works and will do Month to date sales filter.
20:18
View this.
20:20
Now I can see the sales over different time periods.
20:27
I don't have a lot of it.
20:29
Another cool thing you can do is you can quite easily sort it just like you do in Excel by clicking the column headers.
20:37
So I can see which things were hot sellers in November, for example.
20:41
If you've got something with a date range, sold date, range, zero.
20:45
Here, you can configure the dates for that range.
20:50
And there's just such a wide variety of things you can do, that there's, there's a lot of customization you can do to get the report that you want.
21:04
And, Mike, I can see, you're asking.
21:08
Again, while where's the information about what all of this does, this particular report does have a good article written by our Customer Care team, which I'll reference at the end of the webinar. And it does have a lot of information. I'm fairly sure to say it does not cover every single tab in here. So you just have to play around a little bit.
21:29
Or get our help.
21:31
So.
21:36
You can really build out this report now because it came up specifically.
21:43
I'm just gonna bring up this lookup where it's filter, So say you've built this report to filter for your oversold.
21:50
You then could run this report to add a Lookup word.
21:59
To all the items on the report.
22:02
Then when I run the report, it would flag them.
22:06
I can then use that flag to build my count as we reviewed in the previous webinars.
22:12
Lookup words are outside of our topic today, but a very powerful tool and this report can help you add, remove, or filter by lookup words: Very: there's more than I can possibly.
22:23
Even no on this report. So.
22:29
Because I want to get through the other report, two week, it's also highly powerful.
22:32
We're gonna leave that design inventory report at that very powerful tool.
22:37
The last tool, which I think gets overlooked a lot and might be really handy for marketing purposes, is the customer supplier report.
22:45
So under Reports, down here at the bottom, there's these customer and supplier reports here, you can design your own customer supplier report in much the same way, save it for later use.
23:01
On this report, you have a similar number of options and filters.
23:05
So I can display different groups of customers, by customer type, by department, I can add all kinds of filters.
23:17
For date ranges to things like customers that have purchased this much of this product in this timeframe using purchased filters.
23:27
And you can pick what you can want to know about the customers.
23:31
So, say I'm gonna get their names.
23:35
And e-mails.
23:39
Where's the e-mail on this? Let's put their phone numbers on here.
23:45
Like that and I use a purchase filter then I'm able to create a report that I might export and say use with a mass e-mail marketing program, things like that.
23:59
Here again, I have the option to excuse me, add or remove lookup words or exclude or include customers based on look upward.
24:11
By using this tool and say right clicking and exporting it to Excel.
24:18
I can create data for another program and again, not enough bandwidth in one webinar to go through all these different options. But here you can use purchase filters which I think is pretty powerful.
24:30
Do you want to know which customers purchased this particular product that is usually serviced one year from purchase? And they purchased it one year ago, get their e-mails, and then send them all an e-mail to see if you can trigger a service.
24:44
You could use this report to do that.
24:46
So, all the reports in system five are not all, but most have this feature where you can customize the grid.
24:53
And these three reports, the invoice report, design inventory report, and customer and supplier report, are so customizable that it's my belief you could probably report on almost anything with them.
25:07
But if you can't find the reports you want or don't, I haven't been able to use these tools to get it.
25:14
We also have developed an integration with Microsoft Power business Intelligence, which we call Windward Intelligence.
25:22
You may have seen the marketing about it and at this point, I want to hand it over to Robert because he's been doing quite a bit of work with it.
25:29
And he can tell you a little bit about when we're intelligence and how it pulls information out of our database and presents it in some really, really cool look and user friendly reports.
25:41
I'll take over from there. Yes, thank you.
25:45
Someone clicking show your screen, I think you need to hit the change presenter.
25:51
Oh, Thank you.
25:52
Drink Presenter to me, OK, show my screen.
26:01
Which screen are you looking at?
26:04
You've got that goto webinar cracking the code screen up.
26:10
OK, bear with us guys.
26:13
OK, that's OK, I'll just make it work, I'll bring this down here, OK?
26:17
OK, so you see the Power BI now.
26:22
OK, thank you. So this is the website. This is app dot power BI dot com. And the nice thing is, I'll show you behind the scenes in a second under the, under the hood, so to speak.
26:33
This is my word data. These are my word categories.
26:35
These are salespeople that work at my fictional company with my wouldn't dataset of me here, Robert.
26:44
Carl, you know, different staff.
26:46
So, this is the report. And, you can publish online and you can even get these reports like these on your on your mobile device, tablet, phone, what have you.
26:57
And this is just one of several several reports that we've created out the box.
27:02
So, as Scott had mentioned, Power BI and Microsoft Power BI is just the Microsoft product, the reporting product that allows you to hook directly into the Windward database and create reports perhaps are not in winward.
27:22
Or perhaps you want perhaps you want data from 2 or 3 different reports which which is not uncommon.
27:29
Where a client will I love this report and want 2 or 3 columns from that report.
27:34
So, instead of, you know, trying to, we'll merge those two reports together, this is a way where we can find the data we need.
27:45
Bye, Overhand, the right hand side of that, all these different data points, categories, Commission Type customers, and I could to pop these different fields directly from the Windows database into these reports.
28:02
So for clients to purchase the, when we're intelligence, they get these custom reports out the box, and I've been working on some that are really super rough draft, that don't have as much color, because I was just to show you, like, Oh, this is just kind of behind the scenes that my workshop here, we're on making up a report for.
28:23
Purchase orders.
28:24
So based on your, based on your sales history and how long it takes to receive an item and the cost, you know, we can figure out have Power BI calculate for you. The optimum highs and lows.
28:42
So you can, know, optimize your re-ordering.
28:45
something I've tried to do when we're, when we're for years And sort of works with Excel, but works can work better with Power BI.
28:53
So.
28:57
The good.
28:58
The good news is, there are some reports out the box, and if there's a report that you're looking for, that we don't have someone like myself, and one of the programmers can work with you, to pull that data in, and then, um, report on it.
29:14
And for those of you that are a bit more techie and want to learn how to do this, Microsoft itself teaches courses on Power BI. YouTube has some free courses. I'm taking a course on Udemy.
29:27
But, if you don't want to do any of that hard, dirty work, you can just have someone like, myself design these reports for you.
29:35
So, just a little bit of other reporting.
29:39
one of the real things I love about Power BI is because it's pulling it directly from the database, but, actually, it actually runs a bit a bit faster.
29:49
And you can even one last thing before we sign off here.
29:52
You can even slice the data, so I'm looking at my this is a salesperson report. I've got Lionel, R C, four.
29:59
Carl, and Robert, if I click on any of these data points, like if I click on R C four, it changes. The underlying reports, slices it, It tells me, OK, what's our C four been selling?
30:11
If I click on Karo, what Carl been selling, you've been selling lighting and some labor and some vehicle accessories. He hasn't been as active as the other ones.
30:20
So, kinda cool how you can click on one data point and see how it relates to the other fields in your report.
30:27
So a little extra help for those of you wishing to have other reports, best reports, or perhaps, even reports on your mobile device.
30:43
I hand it back to you.
30:45
Awesome.
30:46
Thank you, Rob.
30:47
No, I'm just going to share my screen again here, so I can show you guys a few of the free resources.
30:59
So, one of our attendees here, Mike, has asked a few pointed questions.
31:05
Some of the things I showed you today, there are not full, how to exact direction on how to do everything.
31:13
I can say that in the Customer Care Knowledge database, there is a good tool for The Design Inventory Report that walks through a lot of what I just showed you today, in step by step instructions.
31:26
As well as a great tool for customizing the grid.
31:31
In the Learning Academy, if you use the tag reporting, you will find information on a lot of reporting tools.
31:42
And that's an excellent question.
31:44
Lanta, since Robert did such a great presentation on Winward Intelligence, Lana was asking, Do you have to be in the Cloud to use when we're intelligence? You do not have to be in the cloud use when we're at intelligence.
31:56
It is a lot less work for us, too, Set it up in the cloud, because essentially, you're using a server that we have access to at all times, instead of your own server. So it is less expensive in the cloud than it is on premise, but we do both.
32:13
We install it on people's servers, which is just a little more work for yourself, and your IT team and our IT team. But it works in a similar fashion, in either case.
32:25
So there's some good free resources here.
32:27
And as Kyle outlined at the beginning, reporting is something that's a very important part of using our software. So, often, when you're an implementation and we onboard you, we're not as concerned about reporting. We just want you using the software day-to-day operations. Make sure your staff is trained on how to use it. That's that's a large task for us all to achieve.
32:49
Down the road, once you have a year or two of data, you might be using the canned reports and getting a bit frustrated that you don't have the exact report you need, are doing, as Robert saying, and using two reports, pulling them out to Excel to build your own report.
33:04
Engage with someone on our team. So Robert and I are to the professional services people, but there's also Harry and Alan. And we can help you build these reports, so you don't have to stumble over it. We can just help you with it, if you purchase a reporting plan.
33:18
Or engage with one word intelligence, which gives you 7 or 8 great out of the box. Reports that work in the way Robert just demonstrated.
33:27
Or furthermore, if you purchase limbert intelligence, you can either learn yourself to build those reports or get.
33:34
I'd have to say to probably Robert right now, Roberts Health, building out a new custom report that has that flashy fast look in, his of angel available Moberly.
33:45
But that sometimes involves a little bit of light programming as well, so that does have an additional fee just to be transparent there.
33:54
And this, Well, I'll just close this up, and I just would like to thank all of you. I think a lot of you are repeat customers coming to these webinars over the last 5 or 6 weeks.
34:04
It's been my pleasure to work with you.
34:07
And I know that they're kinda quick, and I try and fit in a lot of content, but I'm hopeful that we will do some more webinars and events next year.
34:16
So, also, some of you are kind enough to complete the survey after the webinar. I really appreciate that.
34:23
And I've added a couple of questions today about the whole series, if you happen to come to the whole thing, and just about things you might like to see in the future. So there's a quick, as soon as we close up here, it'll ask you how we did.
34:34
And there's a place where you can also put in potential topics for us to look at for down the road.
34:40
If I don't chat with any of you, again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and just because I'm Scott may the force be with you. Thanks so much for your time.
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