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Getting started with the Report Designer
Who is this article for?
Users looking to understand the Report Designer.
No special access or permissions are required.
The Report Designer is the platform's self-service document layer. Organisations build and own their templates without external support. Because templates are reusable, updating a template once flows through to every report generated from it going forward.
This article explains high-level information and pulls together resources relevant to the tool.
Overview
The Report Designer is distinct from Queries and Views. Queries extract data for external tools, whilst Views display data inside the platform. The Report Designer produces finished documents for management, committees, or stakeholders.
Benefits
The Report Designer replaces the manual process of exporting data, writing up findings in Word, and checking everything is current before sending. Reports are generated directly from the platform's live data, so they always reflect the current state of the record.
Output
Reports can be generated as PDF for distribution, or Word (DOCX) for further editing after export.
For Audit records, a generated report can also be promoted to an official Audit Report, giving it a status lifecycle and listing it alongside the audit's other reports. Promoting creates a copy - the original stays in the Reports tab - and makes the report visible to everyone with access to the audit, not just the person who generated it.
Users
The Report Designer serves several user groups:
- Template authors - typically audit managers or senior practitioners who design and maintain the templates their team uses
- Report generators - any user who selects an Active template on a record and generates the output document
- Administrators - who manage template permissions and availability
Access is controlled by four separate permissions - create, edit, delete, and change status of report templates - so an organisation can let people build templates without letting them publish or delete them.