The report builder

Every tool in Teralo has a register you can filter, group and export, and for most questions that is enough. The report builder is for the question the register cannot answer: one that spans a date range and a status and a company, that wants a total rather than a list, that has to look the same every month, or that has to cover every project rather than this one.

A report is saved, named, and can be handed to someone else. That is the difference between it and a filtered register.

Reports is a host tool

Before anything else: Reports sits with the host organisation. All three of its permissions are host-only, and the Reports item does not appear in a guest's sidebar at all. A subcontractor working on your job can be sent a report, as a PDF or a spreadsheet, but cannot open the tool.

You will find it in the sidebar's Dashboard group, at project level and at organisation level.

A report is a stack of sections

A report is one or more sections, and each section is a question of its own: its own data source, its own filters, its own shape. The viewer renders them as tabs, and an export gives each one its own worksheet or its own page.

That is what makes a monthly report tractable. Rather than three reports emailed separately, one report carries an open inspections section, an overdue observations section and a permit expiry section, and arrives as one file.

Add a section, name it, and the panel on the right configures it.

Choosing a data source

A section reads from exactly one data source, and there are nineteen:

Each source carries the permission of the tool it reads, checked against you rather than against whoever wrote the report. Three are worth knowing because they are not the obvious one: Procurement and Progress Claims both run on the contracts view permission, Passive Fire Installations runs on the passive fire manage permission rather than the view one, and Organisation Compliance Documents runs on the reports permission itself.

That per-section check is also what makes a shared report safe. A section you cannot see comes back empty with a note saying so, rather than refusing you the whole report.

Some sources ask for a little configuration of their own, such as which mail type to read. Anything the source does not ask for is a filter instead.

List sections and summary sections

Every section is one of two shapes, chosen with the List and Summary toggle.

List

A flat table of rows. You pick which fields appear as columns, in what order, sorted how you like, optionally grouped, and optionally with a footer under a column that counts, sums or averages it.

Summary, which is a pivot table

Rows down the left, categories across the top, an aggregated number in each cell. Summary is the shape for "how many by whom" and "how much by month", where List is the shape for "which ones".

Row groups, pivot columns, aggregation and totals

A summary section is built from four things.

Row Groups are the fields down the left. More than one nests them, outer to inner: contracts inside organisations.

Pivot Columns are the field spread across the top, which is what turns a list into a matrix. Month is the usual one.

Values are what each cell contains, and each value picks a field and an aggregation: count, sum, average, minimum, maximum or count distinct. Counting rows rather than a field is what you want most of the time.

Totals are two switches, row totals down the right and column totals along the bottom.

Drill through to the record

One column in every data source is a drill-through column, and its cell is a link straight to the record it came from. So a list report is not a dead end, it is an index: the row that looks wrong is one click from the thing it describes.

On an organisation report the same link carries the project with it, so a row picked out of a fifteen-project list opens in the right job.

Filters

Filters narrow the section, and each is a field, an operator and a value:

Equals, Not equals, Contains, Does not contain, Greater than, Greater or equal, Less than, Less or equal, Is one of, Is not one of, Is empty, Is not empty, and Date range for date fields, which takes a from and a to.

Is one of takes a comma-separated list, which is the quick way to say "open, submitted and under review" in one filter.

A date range is two fixed dates, not a rolling window. There is no "this month" or "last week" option, so a report you intend to send every week is better filtered on status than on a date range, or its window will be the same every time it arrives. See Exporting and scheduling reports.

Charts

Bar, stacked bar, horizontal bar, line, pie and donut

A list section can carry any number of charts drawn from its rows, in any of those six types. Each takes a category field, a value field and an aggregation.

A summary section carries at most one chart, and it binds to the pivot you have already built rather than being configured separately.

Gauge

A summary chart can also be a Gauge, which draws a single number against a scale. It takes a minimum, a maximum, a warning threshold, a danger threshold and a target, and the arc colours green to amber to red as the number crosses them. Inverse flips the ramp for a measure where lower is better, such as open defects.

Calculated columns

A section can carry columns that are arithmetic on other columns: add, subtract, multiply, divide, percentage, or the variance between two dates. Days until service on the equipment template is one, and so is revenue less cost on the cash position template.

There is no control in the builder for writing one by hand. Two routes get you there: start from a template that already has the column you want, or describe it in words and let the assistant build the section, which is what the next section is for.

Describe your report

Describe your report takes a sentence and builds a section from it: "a summary of open observations grouped by priority", or "a list of this month's contract variations". It picks the data source, the columns, the filters and, where the sentence implies arithmetic, a calculated column.

It builds one section at a time, and it is a starting point rather than an answer: everything it produces is editable, and it deliberately leaves the source's own configuration alone. It spends AI credits like any other AI feature. See AI credits.

The preview

The centre of the builder is a live preview, and it says how many rows it is showing out of how many exist. It is capped at 200 rows. That cap is the preview only; the saved report and every export run the full query.

The builder needs a wide screen

Below about a laptop width the builder replaces itself with a message saying so. There is too much of it to fold into a phone: a field list, a configuration panel and a live preview at once. Reading a report works everywhere; building one does not.

Starting from a template

From Template on the project reports list offers ten pre-built reports, each already carrying its columns, filters and any calculated columns. They are a fully editable starting point, not a fixed format.

• Extension of Time Register, tracking extensions of time from mail items
• Cash Position, monthly revenue against cost from progress claims
• Open Inspections Summary, active inspections with issue counts by type
• Overdue Observations, observations past their due date with days overdue
• Submittal Tracker, submittals by status with review duration
• Permit Expiry Tracker, active permits with days until expiry
• Incident Summary, all incidents with type and status breakdown
• Equipment Service Due, plant approaching or past its service date
• Site Diary Weekly Summary, daily entries with weather and hours
• Booking Utilisation, booking density by organisation

The template picker is on the project reports list. An organisation report starts empty.

Organisation reports read across projects

The same builder runs at organisation level, and the difference is what a section reads. A project report reads that project. An organisation report reads every project your organisation hosts that you personally have the right permission on, and adds a Project column so each row says where it came from.

That last part matters and is easy to misread: the sweep is per person, not per report. Two people opening the same organisation report see the projects each of them can see, so the totals can legitimately differ.

Promote to Org

Promote to Org on a project report copies its definition up to organisation level, where it runs across every project instead of one. The project report stays exactly where it was, and the copy is independent from that point on.

It needs the manage permission at both levels, which is the check that stops a project-level author quietly creating something that reads the whole business.

Duplicating

Duplicate copies a report inside its own level, which is the way to branch a working report before changing it rather than editing the one people are already reading.

The report list

Reports are listed with their name, the data sources they read as badges, who created them, and when they were last changed. A report with more than one section says how many. A report someone has shared with you carries a Shared badge.

PermissionsHost only

• Can view reports and dashboards opens the tool, the list and any report in it
• Can create, edit, and share reports and dashboards covers building, editing, sharing and scheduling
• Can delete reports is separate and is not implied by the manage permission, because a report other people rely on should not disappear as a side effect of being editable

All three are host-organisation permissions. Dashboards themselves have none, and are governed differently. See Dashboards and How permissions work.