Reporting Concepts for New Users

This section is intended for program administrators who are new to the PaymentNet Reporting module. Read this section to learn about:

You can also learn about Reporting by watching the training video on the Resources page in PaymentNet (Help > Resources).

Report Types

PaymentNet offers several types of reports to meet the needs of your organization, including:

Reporting Workflow

This section provides an overview of the workflow tasks required to customize, share, schedule, and run reports.

  1. Assign Report Access to Other Roles - Program Administrator

  2. As a program administrator, you can give other roles access to standard reports and templates via the Report Setup screen (Administration > Report Setup). Users with the selected roles will see these reports and templates in their Report List.

  3. Create and Share New Reports - Program Administrator

  4. You can create new reports from standard reports or templates, according to your business needs. Once you save your report, it will appear in your Report List.

    You can share template-based reports with other roles. Users with these roles will see the report in their Report List and can run it for themselves.

  5. Schedule Report Output - Program Administrator

  6. You can also schedule reports to run on behalf of other users. A scheduled report will run automatically, either on the specified date or on a recurring schedule. After the report has run successfully, the recipients can download the output from the Available Downloads screen.

  7. Create User-Defined Reports - All Roles

  8. Users can create their own version of any report they see in their Report List. Some customization options are only available to users who have a Program Administrator role. See Report Customization Options by Role for more information about which roles have access to specific settings.

  9. Run Reports and Download Output - All Roles

  10. Users can run any report in their Report List. After submitting the report, they can monitor the report status and download the output from the Available Downloads screen.

Creating New Reports

When creating a new report, you begin by selecting an existing report or template from the Report List and displaying its details. Filters and keyword search are available on the Report List screen to help you narrow down the list of available reports and find one to use as a starting point for your own report.

On the Report Detail screen, you can change the report settings as needed. Any settings you don’t change will default to the selections specified in the report or template you started with. If you want to be able to run the report in the future, you must save it with a unique name.

This section explains some of the report settings in more detail:

Filtering report data

Reports can include one or more filters to limit the report data by a date range or other criteria. You can add filters, remove filters, and change the filter criteria as needed.

If a report has multiple filters, you use the and and or operators to specify how the filters should be applied in relation to one another.

Report data can be filtered by hierarchy, which means that the other filters are applied only to the data associated with a specific hierarchy ID. An important difference between standard and template-based reports is the way that hierarchy filters are defined. For standard reports, the option to filter by hierarchy is always available in the report settings. For template-based reports, you must include Hierarchy ID as a column in the report before you can add a filter for it.

Grouping and calculations

A template-based report can be configured to group data on the basis of the values in a specified field. Each time the value in the specified field changes, it creates a visual break in the report to signify the start of a new group. For example, if your report includes transaction data, you could define a group based on the cardholder’s last name. When the report runs, all the transactions with the same last name will be listed together in a group.

A template-based report can also include calculations, which can be either counts (the number of rows) or totals (the sum of the values in a selected field). If a group has been defined for the report, you can add calculations at the group level to produce subtotals, which will appear at the end of each group in the report output.

For example, if the report includes a group for the state where cardholders live, the output could include a subtotal for the number of cardholders in each state, followed by the grand total of all cardholders at the bottom of the report.

Sharing and scheduling

Sharing a report with other users makes the report available to those users in the Report List. They can run the report for themselves or create new versions of it by changing some of the settings. Access to standard reports is granted by role on the Report Setup screen, while template-based reports are shared with other roles in the report settings.

Scheduling a report for other users makes the report output available to those users on the Available Downloads screen. You can schedule reports to run on a specified date or at a specified frequency. Scheduled reports will not appear in the Report List for the recipients (unless the report is also shared with their role). For a scheduled report, the recipients must be given access to the report on the Report Setup screen, or the output will not appear in the Available Downloads list for these users.