The Report creator is the area under your Data Health & Insight client accounts in Dext that holds all journals posted in their general ledgers. Unlike our selection of Practice Insights where you can view all clients in one report, this is a single client report.
Note: The Report creator is available for users with the Data Health & Insights add on. If you’re an existing Precision user, you’ll also have access to this.
What you need to know
- Each Data Health & Insight client in Dext has a Report creator view in the sidebar under Insights.
- Any reports created and saved will be available in every client account under the Custom Reports tab.
- You only need to build the report once and it’ll be available across each one of your Data Health & Insight clients.
- For clients with lots of journals/data we recommend that you run this report with smaller date ranges. As larger data sets can create potentially create performance issues. We are working on a solution to improve this in future.
The Report creator starts with Xero/QuickBooks Online Journal Line Items as a base and supplement each record with additional data based on the type of journal it is – be it an Invoice, Bank Transaction, Credit Note or so on. We also bring in Contact and Account information so you’ve got all the key information you need in one place.
To access this, navigate to Insights and then Report creator from within a Data Health & Insights client.
NOTE: Within the Practice Insight, any metrics not available for QuickBooks Online or Xero clients specifically will be displayed as blank in the relevant column. You can filter for clients from a specific accounting software using the Accounting Software column.
Structure of the Report Creator
Once you understand the structure of the Report creator, you’ll better understand what types of reports you can build from the data set.
This type of table is found across most of our dashboards in Data Health & Insights.
Account Types (1st section)
Every account code in Xero or QuickBooks Online has a hierarchy, for example
- Account class – Asset, Liability, Revenue, Expense, Equity
- Account type – Bank, Current Asset & Liability
- Account – Code, Account Name & Reporting Category
- Dates – Date, Period, Week, Month, Qtr, Year, FY & Created on.
- Source – Ref no, Category, Type, Status, Locked & Link to Xero transactions
- Tracking – Regions
- Contact & Description
- Tax – tax type, codes and effective rates
All lines are journals, not just manual journals but transactions in the ledger.
Note: This is a Xero/QuickBooks Online audit trail. You can see reversals and repostings within the data so if changes are made to a transaction you can see that all tracked.
Additional Information:
- The currency is in the source currency. If your base currency is GBP this is what is shown converted. No FX is in this information.
- The # column is a journal number (by default this is the first column shown on the Report creator). This isn’t shown in QuickBooks Online/Xero; but can be used in the Report creator to see multiple sides of a transaction.
Building Reports
To get started, there are a few customisation options we recommend. Start with selecting the columns you want show in your report by clicking on the right hand side of the report is where you will find Columns and Filters. We’ll start with Columns and the options you have in here.
- Remove all the Columns and start from a blank page by unticking all the checkboxes. To save time you can untick all by unticking the checkbox next to the search box.
- Then add the columns you want to see by ticking the check boxes.
- Group the columns by dragging and dropping them up into the grouping section at the top of the report
- Rearrange columns by dragging a column into the position you prefer.
- Pin columns by clicking on the three lines at the top of the column (equivalent to Freezing in excel)
- You can create Pivot tables just like you can with excel. To do this, click Column and then click the toggle for Pivot Mode . Once you select this option you can then drag a column section down to Column Labels. Common ways to pivot is to drag Period to Column Labels.
Saving & Exporting Reports
Once you’ve created the report, you can click Save top right of the dashboard. Name the report and then choose to either keep the report visible to you only or you can share it with your team.
You can also Export the report and make additional adjustments once exported to Excel/CSV.
Once a report has been saved, you’ll find it under Custom reports in the Insights tab under a Data Health & Insights client. The report will be available in every Data Health & Insights client Custom reports area.
Note: We have created 4 templated reports for you to use to get started.
- Cost Review by Report Code
- Cost Review by Supplier
- Expenses by Month and Contact
- Invoiced Totals by Contact
