Hello. I’m a bit unclear on how reports are currently implemented. As I understand it, they are not available at the moment and are under development.
Here’s the situation: I have three applications. The first one is for companies, the second one is for warehouses, and the third one is for products. I need to create two reports, one simple and the other advanced.
The first report:
Company 1 - Total stock in pieces
Warehouse 1 - Stock of goods in pieces
Warehouse 2 - Stock of goods in pieces
Company 2 - Total stock of goods in pieces
Warehouse 1 - 50 pieces
Warehouse 2 - 100 pieces
And so on for other companies and warehouses.
The second report:
Company 1 - Total stock in pieces
Warehouse 1 - Stock of goods in pieces (sum of all products in the warehouse)
Product 1 - 10 pieces
Product 2 - 20 pieces
Product 3 - 30 pieces (sum of a specific product in this warehouse)
Warehouse 2 - Stock of goods in pieces
Similarly, for Product 1, and so on.
Company 2 - Same as the first company.
These applications are interdependent, meaning companies are linked to warehouses, and products specify which warehouse they belong to.
How can we currently implement such a report for the client? I also believe that when preparing report panels, you need this use case as one of the possible scenarios for company report usage.
@venom - you are correct that at this stage (Sept 2023) Tape does not have a report feature to build the exact reports you are looking for.
You should however be able to accomplish your goal by using filtered views and calculation fields.
Within your Company item, use the relationship field to link with the Warehouse app, and then calculation fields to provide counts of the individual products at those warehouses.
Then another calculation field in the Company app to sum total all the product counts.
You can then arrange the columns of data in the table view to show just the layout of which products the company has in stock at various warehouses for a quick glance ‘report’ solution.
Just to add to @CarsonRedCliffLabs’s absolutely correct and helpful answer, be sure to checkout table calculations as an available feature for “simple reports”:
They allow you to do all sorts of aggregations (e.g. sum, average, max etc.) over different columns, and when combined with calculation fields can yield powerful dedicated reporting layouts in form of a table with calculated stats. We use those heavily for our internal reporting at Tape.
Until then, be sure to vote for the respective feature request.
Actually, I understand how to implement everything using calculation fields and views, but it won’t be quite right and not exactly what we need. We won’t be able to get the report in the format we require.
We’ll have to switch between tabs to view the information.
By creating this post, my main goal was to draw the developers’ attention to the report that I was missing greatly in my work with Podio, and it couldn’t be implemented without third-party tools. Since the Tape community and developers are very attentive to their product, I hope that when creating reporting dashboards, they will take into account that such reports are also necessary for people in their work, and ultimately, they will integrate it into their product.
Unfortunately, due to the non-disclosure agreement, I cannot share screenshots of my clients. However, in Podio, this is achieved through multiple reports within applications.
The first report is created in the “Products” application, as it contains information about the warehouse. I generate a report based on the warehouse with the total quantity of products in it. The second report is generated for specific products with their quantities.
The third report is created in the “Warehouses” application, where I use a calculation field to obtain the total value of products in the warehouse. As a result, I get a report on the total number of products in the company but without specific details.
In the “Companies” application, I pass the total quantity of products in all warehouses to a calculation field and calculate how many warehouses the company has. I generate two reports: one for the total number of warehouses owned by the company and another for the total quantity of products across all warehouses.
Recently, I’ve also started using an alternative method to present information:
I create a “Reports” application, link it to the “Companies” application, and then create a chain in each of the applications to obtain values using calculation fields. In the “Warehouses” application, I calculate the total number of products, and this same quantity is transferred to the “Companies” application. I also calculate the total number of products and the total number of warehouses in the “Companies” application. All these fields are hidden.
In the “Reports” application, I create calculation fields and fetch all three numbers from the “Companies” application. Then, I create a card, select the company, and the calculation fields automatically populate with the numbers. I repeat this for all companies. Afterward, I either view the cards (if there aren’t many) or create tables within the cards for each company to make everything look visually appealing. Alternatively, I create reports within the “Reports” application.
The second method involves transferring all the necessary fields to Power BI through automation and creating the required charts and reports there in the desired format.
Yes, I can do the same in Tape, but both of these methods are time-consuming and inconvenient. In the first case, you constantly need to switch between at least two different applications.
In the second case, not only do you need to transfer the data, but also convert it, which is a very labor-intensive process.
That’s why I would like to have a proper tool for my clients, rather than resorting to workarounds. It’s simply not convenient and not productive. I hope the Tape team will help me with this.
we will definitely make sure you get rid of your workarounds.
Indeed, with the dashboard apps that are currently in development, you will get pretty sure exactly what you are looking for!
The dashboard apps will be like database apps on the same hierarchical level as apps. So you can build them for clients and provide them with the app permissions only for the users who should see the dashboard. You can then add any database apps as data sources to which you have permissions and access that data.
The development is very complex though, because we want to do it right and therefore have to develop a lot of new base technologies to be able to solve more complex requirements, like your use case and other requests from our users, so that we hopefully won’t need workarounds for advanced reports in the future.
By the way, thank you very much for providing us with your requirements, so we can check our approach when we get to the point of testing first use cases with it.