A report is a document Pyron makes from your data: a shift handover, a compliance summary, a monthly roll-up. It is laid out on pages the way your organisation wants it and kept as a PDF you can open, download, print or send. Every report comes from a report template, and an automation can make one 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. It redraws as data changes, so it always shows the latest picture. A report is the opposite: a fixed document, made at one moment, that captures the data as it stood then 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 made, newest first. Each row shows the report's name, the template it came from, when it was created and its format. Opening a report shows the finished document. You can narrow the list by name, template, creation date or format.
Each report captures your data at the moment it was made, 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 generated reports.
Templates decide the look
A report template is the reusable design behind every report. It decides what the document shows, from which of your records, how its pages are laid out and what paper it prints on. It also says which details it needs each time it is made, such as the site to cover or the shift the report is for. Those details are the template's inputs.
You do not write a template by hand. You describe the report you want to the assistant, and it writes the template for you. The editor previews it as the printed pages, with the real page breaks, the header on each page and the footer, so you see exactly what a reader will get. When something is not right, you say so and the assistant changes it.
The templates area shows your report templates as cards or as a table, each card previewing the last report that template made. Deleting a template leaves the reports already made from it untouched: those are kept. To create one and shape it with the assistant, see Report templates.
Schedules and email delivery
A report gets made in one of two ways:
- When something happens. An automation makes the report as one of its steps, for example when a shift ends or a form is submitted, and passes the template the details it needs.
- On a schedule. An automation runs at a set time, such as every morning or the first of each month, makes the report and emails the PDF to a chosen list of people.
Either way, the automation fills in the template's inputs, and each report it makes is kept in the reports list, so the copy in Pyron matches what recipients received. Setting this up is a one-time job for whoever manages reporting in your organisation. See Report schedules.