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Tutorial - Reports for Designers

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This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the Report Designer user and provides detailed information on how to build and share reports.

Types of Users

There are two kinds of users:

  • Viewers, who have the following rights:
    • Viewing the reporting module
    • Viewing reporting dashboards, widgets, or folders for which they have permission and have been shared with them
    • Cosmetically interacting with dashboards or widgets
    • Downloading files for dashboards and widgets
    • Receiving scheduled reports (users who want to get schedule reports must have view-only rights for reporting)
    • Modifying any of the dashboard & widget filters that have been made available to them by the owner of the dashboard (these changes are stored locally unless an Owner makes a change, republishes it, and refreshes and the Viewer refreshes as well)
  • Designers, who have the following rights in addition to Viewer rights:
    • Creating new dashboards and reports (in which case they become the owner of the dashboard)
    • Modifying or deleting an existing report
    • Duplicating an existing report
    • Modifying the orientation/layout/structure of widgets within the dashboard
    • Modifying view permissions for dashboards

Owners can modify the report and push updates to other users by republishing the dashboard.  All other users viewing/designing the dashboard must refresh on their end as well in order to see the changes the owner has made. An owner can explicitly give other users designer or view-only rights to their dashboard. A user's security permission for reporting is is limited by the type of user he or she is. For example, a view-only user (by system permission) cannot be given designer rights to a dashboard, but a designer user (by system permission) can be assigned as a view only or designer user to a specific dashboard.

Everything in this tutorial pertains to Designer users. 

Dashboards

A dashboard is collection of graphic reports or widgets based assembled by a designer to display quantitative data. The designer that creates a dashboard becomes the dashboard’s owner. Each dashboard can have only one owner.

For more information on Dashboards, refer to TCBI - Dashboards.

Widgets

Widgets enable you to graphically represent data from a specific report and also view data in a graphical format that is quick to comprehend. 

For more information on widgets, refer to TCBI - Widgets.

Troubleshooting

Why are the widgets showing a $0 value for budget allocated?

By design, the "Account Total Allocated" field pulls budget data from the "Fees" and "Expenses" level. If you budget on a different level, you will see these values return as $0 in your widgets even when you know there is a budget allocated. If you need to build reports on a different level budget; i.e. Vendor level or Matter level, contact Services to run the customized script that will pull "Account Total Allocated" from the correct location.

Why is there a null record on my report? 

An additional dummy/null record is created on the core system entities to support outer joins in Sisense. This record has blank values across the table except for system_modified_on. You can avoid this record on your reports by adding a filter on one of the entity fields:

  1. In the report, select the entity field in the filters (for example, Contact Name)
  2. On the list of values that appears, deselect N/A values to filter out the null values. 

Why are account months displaying in alphabetical order? 

The Account Month field returns the three letter month name. The account months are displaying by month name in alphabetical order.

The Account Fiscal Month number field is called "Account Fiscal Month". That field will return the number month of the fiscal year; i.e. 1,2,3,4,... Use the Account Fiscal Month to return a numeric value for the field to sort the months in the sequential order.

Why did a line disappear on my line chart report?

The line disappears on a Line Chart widget. When you add two x-axis items, the chart's x-axes are combined and a separate plot (line) is displayed for each unique value of the second x-axis. If the same dimension is added twice, all values will be unique and you will see points, not a line.

Why do some of my reports have errors and some of my tables/fields have disappeared?

Check if any of the objects have been renamed. Renaming an object will require remapping fields on any dashboards using that object.

Why do abbreviated numbers sometimes change as I navigate the system, change filters, and/or edit widget components?

By default, Sisense has the decimals checked for automatic selection. The default is that decimals will automatically select a value. For charts and graphics that deal with currency, you must set the decimals to 2.

I am reporting on an embedded object and I see elements that don't actually exist on the environment. Why?

Business Intelligence does not differentiate between child and embedded objects. Thus, all child and embedded objects will be added to the ElasticCube and be reportable.

My Top 10 filter is including values from non-top 10 items when I drill down into the information.

To solve this issue, create a top 10 filter from the widget value instead of the dimension:

  1. Add the filter to the applicable field in the Values section on the left pane.
  2. Apply the filter to the applicable value in the left pane.

What can cause my reports to be inaccurate?

  • When reporting on account budget and spend fields, do not include invoice-related fields (custom or system) or filters because the data could be counted more than once (i.e., double or triple the expected amounts).
  • A report that includes invoice-related fields could cause a cartesian product because of the one-to-many relationship with matters to budget/spend and invoices to budget/spend.
  • Rates information in the Business Intelligence solution is retrieved directly from the Contact Rate table in TeamConnect. The currency for rates uses the currency for the contact.
  • You are not currently able to filter Invoices based on Account Fiscal Year (or Account Year). The Invoices are related to the Matter only. Account Fiscal Years are also only related to the Matter. If your widget has the Invoice data for a specific Matter, filtering on Account Fiscal Year will not have any effect.

When adding subtotals on values in a pivot table, the report displays blank lines. Why?

If the field is part of the rows, the subtotal does not display. Move the field to Values, then right-click and apply Subtotal by and Sum.

I need to create a filter for values that don't exist yet. For example, I need to build a financial report that calculates sums from the invoices tables. However, I need to filter out invoices where status = Rejected. My data set does not yet include invoices with that status. Can I do this?

Use a text-based filter and type in the condition/filter to allow filtering values that don't exist in the eCube yet.

Why don't the percentages on a pie chart equal 100%?

If the pie chart does not equal 100% due to rounding, enable decimal places to one decimal place

How do I find a list of matters that are either Litigation as the primary matter type, or have been converted to Litigation later?

Use Matter Category to filter on any matter that has "Litigation" category regardless of the Primary Matter Type.