A report is a document Pyron builds from your data — a shift handover, a compliance summary, a monthly roll-up — laid out the way your organisation wants it and saved as a file you can open, download or send. Every report comes from a template, and a template can run on a schedule so the finished document reaches the right people without anyone lifting a finger.
Reports are documents, dashboards are screens
A dashboard is a live screen you look at inside Pyron. Its widgets redraw as data changes, so it always shows the latest picture. A report is the opposite: a fixed document, generated at one moment, that captures the data as it stood when it ran and does not change afterwards. You watch a dashboard; you keep, print or send a report. For more on the live view, see Dashboards.
The reports area lists every report that has been generated, newest first. Each row shows the report's name, the template it came from, when it was created, and whether it is saved as a PDF or as a web page you can open in the browser. Opening a report shows a preview of the finished document. You can narrow the list by name, template, creation date, or format.
Each report captures your data at the moment it ran, so two reports from the same template on different days can read differently. That is the point — a report is a dated account of how things stood, not a window onto how they stand today.
To work through the reports list and open past documents, see Browsing reports.
Templates decide the look
A template is the reusable blueprint behind every report. It holds the layout — headings, tables, your organisation's branding — together with a definition of which data to pull in. Generating a report runs the template against your data and produces one document; the same template can produce many reports over time, each a snapshot from when it ran.
The templates area shows your report templates as cards or as a table, with each card previewing the last document that template produced. From here you create a template, open one to change its layout or data, or delete one you want to remove. Deleting a template leaves the reports already generated from it untouched — those are kept.
Building a template is where you shape both halves at once: the look of the page and the data behind it. To create one and edit it with help from the assistant, see Report templates.
Schedules and email delivery
A report gets generated in one of two ways:
- On demand — someone opens a template and runs it, filling in any options the template asks for, such as a site or a date range. See Previewing and generating.
- On a schedule — Pyron runs the template on its own at a set time, such as every morning or the first of each month, and emails the finished document to a chosen list of people.
When a report runs on a schedule, no one is there to fill in the options, so it uses the defaults built into the template and works out the time period to cover from the moment it runs. A monthly report scheduled for the first of the month therefore covers the month just gone. The document it produces is attached to an email and sent to the recipients set up for that schedule.
Because a scheduled report reads its time period from when it runs, the same schedule fired at different times covers different spans. That is expected for time-based reports — each run reports on the window that ended when it fired.
Setting up a schedule and its recipient list is a one-time job for whoever manages reporting in your organisation. See Scheduling reports.