Jan 23, 2018

SOBS has a flexible but simple reporting tool that is accessible by all staff.  Staff can create and store their reports, or schedule them to run on a regular basis.

Creating Reports

When logged into SOBS, click on your name (bottom left) and then on ‘My reports’.  This will display a list of your reports.  To add a new report open the menu at the top right of the table and click the ‘Add report’ option.

When creating a new report there are three main sections to be completed:

1. Identify the date range.  This is done through two parameters, the first if the date offset and the second is the days to be included.  If you report is for the week ahead then you would leave the offset at 0 (starting from today) and then set the include-days value to 7 (to include the next 7 days).  If you were wanting to report just the day ahead you would use 0 and 1 (starting from today and including 1 day).  If you were processing historical information you would set the offset to a negative value (starting so many days in the past) and the include days would be a similar but positive value (to include all of the days up to today).  For example, to report on the last year use the values -365 and 365 (this will go back 365 days and then include 365 days from that time, and report bookings for the last 365 days).
2. The second section is the selection of bookings using a range of criteria.  Selected staff members, selected categories or resources, or selected booking types (if you are using booking types).  If you want to select everything then you don’t need to change any values here – by default we are selecting all bookings, so any option you set will limit the selection criteria.
3. The format of the report can be a ‘List’ or a ‘Table’.  The List format will display details from the bookings one line at a time.  Typically this report is useful if you want a list of the booking information for a particular set of bookings.  The Table format allows cross mapping of data in a number of ways.  With the Table format you will select an X and Y axis value and then choose the table cell content.  When selecting the X and Y axis values you must consider what would be good options, for example it might be useful viewing Periods down the Y axis and Resources along the X axis, depending on how many periods and how many resources are defined within your school.  Things you wouldn’t do is to place the same value (like Date) on the X and Y axis.  The cell content gives you options of various combinations of information from the booking (which will be relevant because it has not already been identified by the row or column values), or there are also special options for ‘Count’ and ‘Duration’ – these are values for statistical reporting.  In the ‘Table’ format there is an additional entry for ‘Minimise rows’ – this will drop rows at the beginning and end of the report where they contain no booking information.  This option is useful when you have before and after school periods that would contain no information.

There is a fourth section, however this is optional. This final section allows you to schedule the report to run on some regular schedule.  The output from the report is sent by email to yourself, another user, or some other email address (that must be confirmed before it will operate).

Running Reports

From the report menu (on the right of the table) you can select ‘Run report’ to run a report.  You may schedule the report to be run.

A scheduled report will be run early in the morning, and the output of the report sent via email to the nominated address.

If the report does not contain any records then no email is sent.

Cell Contents

Most of the ‘Cell content’ descriptions are self explanatory, except for:

• Count periods – a total of the number of periods that have been booked
• Total duration – the total amount of time consumed by these bookings

These values are useful to report the statistics for usage by resource or category or staff member or booking type.  The table view also allows the breakdown to report category by booking type or booking type by staff member for example.