Tutorial on Advanced Reporting in Silent Partner Cloud
Advanced Reporting requires special permissions in Silent Partner. If you need access to Advanced Reporting, speak with your system administrator.
Silent Partner Software will build your report for you! Contact support@silentpartnersoftware.com or your Account Manager to learn more.Getting started
With Advanced Reporting in Silent Partner Cloud, you can create custom reports and dashboards and share those reports with ease.
Open Advanced Reporting
To create a new report, click "New."
Building New Reports
For this example, we will build a report of total donations for each year, broken down by donor type.
Step 1: Selecting your data
The report builder will open to the Data Sources tab. In this example, we will be building a donation report, so you can check the box next to "Account Activity Donation Details," or use the "Recent Data Sources" drop down to select it.
Next, got to the Fields tab. In the Field drop down, select Donor Type and select Group under Function. This will group the results of your report by donor type. In the second line, under Field, select "Donation $," and in the Function drop down, select "Sum." Next, click the Add Pivot Button.
Some new options will appear called "Add pivot columns for" and " Calculate cell values on." Next to Add pivot columns, select "Donation Date," then use "Group (Year)" for the function. Next to Calculate cell values on, select "Donation $," and use "Sum" as the function. This will add a column to your report for each year with a total for each year by Donation Type.
Finally, click the "Add Side Total" option. This will add a final column with the totals for each row (Donor Type) in your report.
Step 2: Filtering your data to a specific time frame
To restrict your report to a specific number of years, go to the Filters tab. In the first line under Filter Field, select "Donation Date." Under Operator, select "is Greater Than" and enter "2014" in the Value(s) field. This will restrict your report to only show results for 2015 onwards.
Step 3: Naming and saving your report
To give your report a name and save it, go to the Misc tab and give the report a title that will appear on the report. We'll call it Overall Results by Gift Source - Revenue.
Next, go to the Preview tab and your report will run in preview mode.
The Results drop down menu controls how many records are included in the preview. The higher the number here, the more accurate the preview will be, but the longer it will take to produce the preview for you.
The results in the Preview mode are NOT the final numbers, they're just a preview!
Finally, click the Save Icon. In the pop-up window that appears, type in a report name and select which Category you want to save the report under. This is how you will find the report in the list of available reports. We'll call it Overall Revenue by Gift Source - Revenue.
This is the report, although your numbers will be different!
Modifying Your Report
In this example, we'll modify the report to provide total number of donors each year for each donor type.
Step 1: Rename and save your report
Click "Save As" and rename the report Overall Results by Gift Source - Number of Donors. This is how the report will appear in the list of available reports. It will save in the same category unless you select a different category in the second drop down.
Step 2: Changing the results of your report
Return to the Fields tab and change "Donation $" to "Donor #," and change "Sum" to "Count Distinct."
Step 3: Change the name on the report
On Misc tab, change the Title to Overall Results by Gift Source - Number of Donors. Remember, this is the name that appears on the report.
Preview the report and you'll see it provides a count of donors for each Donor Type for each year. Again, this is just a preview, so your actual numbers may be different.
If you would like to create a Dashboard using these reports, refer to our article on Creating and working with Dashboards in Advanced Reporting.
Tips and Tricks to make building your reports faster!
Tip #1 - only preview a few records!
Under the “Results” drop down, leave the default value of 50. This means Silent Partner only has to work with 50 records to create your preview instead of going through thousands.
Tip #2 - set your filters before previewing!
The Filters tab is where you tell Silent Partner which records to include in your report and which to ignore. If you set up your filters before previewing, Silent Partner only looks at records that should be included instead of trying to preview every record in your database.
For larger databases, filtering becomes crucial as it allows you to limit your search results to the specified criteria, e.g. a certain date range, and considerably reduces the time and capacity needed to pull the data, preventing the system from crashing.
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