One of the best attended sessions at NTEN's 14NTC was the Data Visualization session. It was not only standing room only, but it also included people sitting on the floor and standing outside the room trying to hear tips and insights about this hot topic.
CiviCRM has a wide selection of reports. Users can choose out of the box reports, but if these don't meet your needs, you can also customize them.
There are times though, that there is a need to analyze data, not only from CiviCRM, but from other applications, such as an online store and/or your CMS. The beauty of CiviCRM is that it's so flexible and open that it can integrate with third party applications like Jasper. We have used Jasper successfully with our clients - in our experience, Jasper offers more flexibility in terms of input and output, reports are quicker to develop and there's no need to know PHP.
Following are four samples of reports that our clients have requested, utilizing their CiviCRM and Magento databases and pulling the data in new and interesting ways:
- Daily reconciliation report - Need to see your Civi and store data in one report, to reconcile against your payment processor? See a sample of a spreadsheet of daily transactions from both Civi and Magento, emailed to the client each morning.
- Historical statistics - If you're storing historical statistics (e.g., attendance and pledges for a church), these can be pulled from your database and presented in graphical format.
- Participant report by price set - Are you registering users for events with multiple sessions or workshops? That information can be pulled for handy lists so you can see at a glance how many attendees you have signed up for each session.
- Donated in period A but not period B - Want to track how engaged your contributors are and how regularly they donate? Puzzled by fluctuations in your monthly contributions? See a sample of a report that shows you who donated in one period of time but not another.
If you'd like to see a video of these reports, please click here.
Comments
Version 1 of CiviReports many years ago was an integration with Jasper Reports. The reason it was replaced with PHP coded reports was the complexity and cost at the time of supporting Java on the server. Any thoughts on current support for Java in the LAMP VPS market?