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Roundtable: Reports Tips & Tricks
Roundtable: Reports Tips & Tricks

March 3, 2021

Jaime Morgan, CAE avatar
Written by Jaime Morgan, CAE
Updated over 2 years ago

This roundtable was all about reports! We took a look at our Membership Change Summary report, Set of Options report, and exchanged useful tips for built-in reporting throughout the Novi platform. Attendees shared some of their own reports' best practices, including ones to create and use for data cleanup, membership (and more), and tips on what fields to use when building a custom report.

Related Help Articles:


Tips:

Utilize built-in reporting

No need to go to custom reports for everything, there are many areas in Novi where you can find built-in reporting:

Members

Engagement

  • Use the Timeline on a record to see a Company or Person's activities. Use the filters to narrow down the results and see engagement by activity type.

  • Trying to find how engaged a particular Member or Member Company is? Look at the Events Column on the person or company's record. For an individual, it will show the events they've attended, and for a Company, it displays the events staff within the family tree registered for.

Events

  • In the Attendees list of an event, use the gear to add columns such as Billing Address, First/Last name, Attendee Expiration dates, Open Balance, and custom fields. If you can't find a custom field here, update its visibility to be displayed on the Events.

  • Use the Filters to quickly find just the information you need - filter by registration types and payment status.

  • Custom field not displaying on the attendee list? Here's how to fix that.

Groups

  • Use a Novi Group to segment your member data by commonalities. The benefit of groups is that you can then use the Group to lock down content, send targeted marketing, and more.

  • Using the Open Dues Balance condition, you can create a Group of members with Open Dues Balances, then Send a Custom Email to those Members to encourage/remind them to pay.

Accounting > Transactions Tab

  • Use the Gear to add columns to this list, including Billing & Shipping Addresses, Primary/Billing contacts, Auto-Pay, phone, and email.

  • Use the filters to segment the list by Type of Invoice, Recently Paid, and more.


Custom Report Tips

1. Use Categories to organize, and clear Naming conventions

  • Categorize your Custom Reports. Suggested categories include: Membership, Events, Government Affairs, and Novi Support reports, or, organize them by staff member name.

  • For reports where a condition will need to be updated before running, such as updating a date range, name it so you know you'll need to configure it: "Prompt Report" or "Change Dates"

  • No need to recreate the wheel! Do you need similar information to a custom report already created? Copy it, then update the conditions.

2. Conditions & Display Settings

The Conditions you choose are what affect the report's results.

Condition Tricks:

  • Trying to find a person? Use First Name = Is Not Null

  • If your membership type flows benefits from a company down to the staff, the staff's membership status is Inheriting.

  • For most reports, you'll want to use either Membership Status or Parent Member Status.

Display Settings tips:

  • Don't scroll - type! Type in the keyword to shorten the list of available fields.

  • General Info > Name = this is the company or person's name

  • Contact Info = this is the record's contact information. If your conditions are pulling Company records, the Contact Info > Email will be the Company's email. If your conditions are pulling people records, the Contact Info > Email will be the person's email address on their record.

  • Reports based on people: to display their parent information in the results, type in "Parent Info" first.


Custom Report Recommendations

(A big thanks to Russ Webb, BAAA for this list!)

Tip: If you'd like to send targeted email marketing or lockdown content based on some of these suggestions, consider making a Novi Group.
See also: Should I Create a Report or a Group?

Membership

  • List of new members by certain date

  • Parent Information missing – critically important if you’re a trade association!

  • Members without a billing contact, primary contact, or both

  • Members who expire past the regular renewal year (for example, 2050)

  • Join date within last X days – greater than/equal and less than or equal

Accounts:

  • Has user account, has logged in

  • Has user account, has not logged in

  • No user account --- use a Novi Group and sync to your email to encourage them to create their accounts

Credentials, Interest Groups

  • People with certain credentials & designations

  • People with certain Interest Groups

Government affairs

  • Zip code, county, city

  • "Member Type" + Zip (prompt) – edit the group to update the zip code, then run the report. Y


Need to clean up some dirty data? Check out these data cleanup tools in Novi!

Address Cleanup Tool - helps you quickly identify and update records in your system without a billing/shipping address, or perhaps records with an address that you know isn't quite right.

DataMaid - a QuickBooks Online data cleaning tool that sweeps and scans your data to identify errors and update them on the spot.

QuickBooks Analyzer - scans your QuickBooks record data for things like duplicates, ambiguous records, and invalid formatting. This tool is something you may want to consider running every week to two weeks, to keep your data in top shape.

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