3 Tips To Simplify OpenAir Report Creation To Get The Data You Need

There is a great deal of truth to the quote “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”. That’s particularly true for a professional services organization. There are so many moving pieces – from resourcing to project planning to billing to projections – that an overview of all of that information is crucial to understanding where your business is at, where it’s going in the short term, and how to power growth in the long term.

Understanding that, it’s easy to see how important reporting in OpenAir is for your organization. Yet creating powerful, customized, meaningful reports in OpenAir can present a challenge. There are a number of tips and tricks you can use to simplify report creation and get exactly the data you need.

1. Filtering is A Key Piece to Getting the Reports You Need

Filtering is the means by which you can get the information you need out of OpenAir, but it may not work exactly the way you expect. It’s important to think of filtering as less of a search and more of, well, a filter. Because OpenAir’s filter mechanism isn’t context base, you’ll need to view the data through the lens of what you want and what you don’t – in other words, what do you want to include, and what do you want to exclude.

Filtering is, therefore, focused on lists, including the main objects available, like User, Client, Project, Services, Booking Type, and so forth. You are not, however, restricted to the main objects for reporting. You can use custom fields – if they are the right type.

To use custom fields in your reports, they must also be a list type of field, like a dropdown, a picklist, a radio group, checkboxes, or multi-selection. When configuring OpenAir, you’ll need to consider if a field may be used for reporting at some point in the future, even if it isn’t being used today. Setting up a custom field as a list from the start can save headaches later on.

2. Bad Reports Can Hide Good Ones

Depending on the standards and governance used, OpenAir can get pretty muddled with user-created reports. There are two ways to combat “report volume creep” – establish reporting naming conventions, and schedule regular report clean up.

Establishing naming conventions can help clarify report owners and purpose. Begin each report with a prefix that identifies the main audience for a report. For example, reports for sales could start with SALE, finance reports could start with FIN, and project management might start with PRJ. Prefixes should be kept short – only 3 or 4 letters – and they should be clear. Once established, the key will be to socialize these prefixes and police their usage until it becomes second nature to users.

Clean up is another important maintenance task that can keep the most usable reports in front of your teams and not buried behind stale reports. Consider establishing a twice-yearly schedule of report clean up. Set a reasonable deletion date – perhaps a week or two out – and inform users that reports that haven’t been run in the last six months will be removed on that date. Make sure users understand that to keep a report active, they only need to run it. You should also offer the option for users to notify you of reports that should not be deleted – some reports are only run once a year, and you wouldn’t want to delete a finance report that’s needed for the annual Board of Director’s meeting!

3. Get the Data Out of OpenAir for Analysis

While there is a lot you can get out of OpenAir’s built-in reporting engine, it may not be able to provide you with a complete picture or the full analysis that you need. Luckily, there are several mechanisms that can be used to get data out of OpenAir and into other tools.

One method is using the Odata connector. Companies that purchase this connector are able to publish tabular, or raw data, reports that can be used by BI tools like Tableau or PowerBI. Your BI team or users can then leverage these powerful analytics tools to create deep analysis or dashboards for the information housed in OpenAir.

Another means of getting the data out for use by other analytics tools is having an API integration built that pulls the data into a data warehouse. While this is a larger undertaking, it opens up possibilities for utilizing OpenAir’s data with other information from across the company and gives you more complete access to OpenAir’s fields.

Lastly, OpenAir uses an automatic backup service that creates a full copy of your database instance. This database copy could be used with your analytics tools to create reports and dashboards and facilitate analysis.

The most important thing with reporting is ensuring that you have the information you need to make data-driven decisions about the business. These are just a few of the tips and tricks you can use with OpenAir’s reporting engine to get the information you need to understand how your business is performing and operating. Looking for more tips? Check out our webinar on OpenAir Reporting Tips and Techniques.