Nothing’s hard than tracking the status of your projects across teams, offices, clients, campaigns, and deadlines. How do you keep an eye on all that information, let alone keep it organized, cohesive, and—most importantly—on track?
Gryffin’s robust Reports feature makes it easy to build project status report templates that can be used to track your data continuously. These templates can be used to create custom reports that will keep you on the pulse of your project deadlines, team activities, and even company expenses.
Types of Project Status Report Templates
With Gryffin, the type of report you select will determine the type of data the report will pull from. There are 4 main report types, with more being added in our product roadmap.
1. Reporting on Projects
Go to Admin > Company > Reports.
To create a new report, click the Create Report button and select “Project” in the drop-down:
Name your Report
You’ll be taken to the page where you can build your report template.
First, name your report, so you can save and retrieve it in the future:
Filter by Workspace or Group
Now you can specify if you want your data to be pulled from a specific Workspace or Workspace Group. You can also limit the data to active, archived, or all projects.
If you want to search for projects that are NOT in a specific group, you can use the green Except button.
For example, you may want to see projects in a Marketing group, but exclude the Content workspace. This means your report will not pull data from the excepted group.
Select your Date Range
Next, you’ll need to specify the date range of the projects you want to work with.
Selecting the presets gives you quick shortcuts to select a predetermined date range, such as “this year” or “last month”.
Alternatively, you can use the custom date range selector and choose the exact dates you need:
Because of the dynamic nature of Gryffin, you can also filter based on the different date fields in the workspaces or groups you selected. The default is “Created at” but if you limit your search to just a workspace, you can select date ranges from a specific field of your workspace template.
Those are the basic options you need to select before Gryffin can run a report for you. But it doesn’t end there.
Additional Filtering Capabilities
You can add additional filters to your report template by using the Additional Filters drop-down menu:
Which add filters for variables such as…
- Campaign
- Client
- Contact
- Status
- Task
- Team
- User
If you use the field “client” or “team” you can see the projects assigned to a particular client or team within a selected date range, etc.
You can see projects assigned in a workspace to a particular user, or in a particular status.
These dynamic filtering capabilities will allow you to mix and match the different types of filters to create a custom report based on exactly the data you need to see.
Report Columns
The middle column gives you a choice of what fields to use when building your report. This list is compiled from the fields available in the workspaces you selected:
You can unclick fields you don’t want to be added to your report template, or drag and drop them up and down to rearrange the order.
Don’t Forget to Save and Run
Once you’ve seen a preview of the report and the data fits your needs, be sure to click on “Save and Run” to generate the full report.
2. Reporting on Tasks
The “Tasks” Report Type, you can focus on understanding the flow of tasks in your company.
You can answer questions such as:
- What pending tasks does this user have this month?
- How many tasks for this user are overdue?
- Are there unassigned tasks (where the task has been created, but there’s no user assigned to the task)?
- What tasks did a specific user complete this month?
- How many tasks are pending for a cohort of users?
You can either create a new report from the main Reports page or use the Reports Type drop-down to change the type of your template:
Task Filter Options
When you select a Task Report template, you’ll notice your filter options change. You can select what tasks you want to report on, including to which users they are assigned (or not assigned) and their status.
Like with Project reports, you can select the date range (in this case, Due Date), add Additional Filters, and select what fields you want included in your report template:
When you need to figure out what team members have a low workload, or how many tasks have been completed in a workspace or by a user, or who has too much work overdue, you can now easily get this data using our reporting functionality.
3. Expense Reports
Need to know how much you’re spending on each client? Campaign? Team? Project? Workspace? All of that info is available using the expense tracking reports in Gryffin.
This report uses data from the billing widget/add on available as part of your project hub.
When a team member completes a project, they can open the Billing widget (More > Billing), and generate a project expense.
An admin user or supervisor can then approve that expense, and this approval then adds the sum of that project to the project total:
When using Expense reporting, this is the data, based on project expenses, that will be included in your Expense Reports.
How much did ________ cost?
With expense reports, you can identify exactly how much a particular type of project cost, how much you paid a user during a specific time period, how much a client’s project cost across workspaces and group, how much you spent in total during a particular date range, and more.
If you want to see a total of the expenses, you can click on your “expenses” filter and click Show as Group.
When the report is generated, you’ll have an additional row on the bottom with the total spent based on your filters.
Now you can stop wondering if you’ve overspent on a project, client, workspace, project type, or campaign.
4. Reporting on Accounts Payable
By using the project expense and billing functionality, users can submit invoices in the system. You can create reports based on these invoices to track the total paid to a particular user, invoices in a particular status, total amounts spent on a date range, etc.
For users to submit an invoice, they can click on Admin > Accounting, and on the red plus.
An admin will see an process these invoices, which can then be used to create Accounts Payable reports.
You can then export this data, and soon, there will be API integrations into Quickbooks and other accounting software.
Using the Reporting Functionality
Now that you understand how to build and save your report templates, you can come back and run them again at any time! Simply go to the reports page, where you’ll find your list of saved reports, and click the Run button:
In this way, you can easily run daily, weekly, or monthly reports to get a better understanding of your company’s productivity and spend.
Of course, at different stages in your project management journey, you’ll need different reports. Once you know what your questions and needs are, you can go to the reports feature to look for that data.
Some of our favorite ways to use the reports include:
- Save custom reports for each client so we can track the status of all a client’s projects across workspaces and groups.
- Overdue tasks in the company to make sure nothing gets forgotten
- Projects without tasks – these can easily file by the wayside if they don’t have tasks
- Unassigned Tasks to make sure the task wasn’t created but a user forgot to assign the task
- Total cost of a client or a user during a month
- Completed tasks within a date range
What Reports Do You Need?
If you need data that isn’t available at this time, don’t hesitate to let us know. By adding more filters and creating additional tracking parameters, we can make more data available to you. We have big upgrades coming for this feature and would love your feedback as we move ahead!