New and Enhanced Reports for Simple In/Out

Throughout the summer we haven’t had many blog posts, but we’ve been busy working on some exciting changes to Simple In/Out. We think everyone will love the new features we have coming before the end of 2017.

Today we’re reinventing reports for Simple In/Out. Based on customer feedback, we’ve retooled most of our existing reports to be faster and easier to use for organizations with lots of users. We’ve also consolidated some reports and created two new reports to better address printing and exporting.

Running Reports for Lots of Users

If you have a large organization, running reports in Simple In/Out before today could take quite a while. For example, running a Daily Timeline report for 150 users would make 150 report requests to Simple In/Out. Maybe you were after only a few users and many of those were unnecessary. Maybe your goal was to print and you just had to wait.

To solve this problem, we’ve added a new user selector. This control allows admins to select specific users as well as groups. You can also select more than one user or group, giving precise control over exactly who the report will display when it’s run.

For more speed, many of our reports are now paginated. In the Daily Timeline example, running a report for 150 users now only runs 10 at a time with buttons below to change to the next page. You can page through quickly to see results you’re interested in, or you can use the new user selector to reduce the size of the list.

Paging results also allows us to merge the Daily Activity and Weekly Activity into simply the Activity report.

Printing and Sharing

Printing has always been a feature we’ve left to the web browser. All browsers have support for printing, but that support is limited at best. Not every web browser prints the same way.

We’ve decided to support printing as a first-class citizen via our new Print/PDF report. This report creates a PDF that you can download, print, share with those that need it, etc. Because we generate this report as a download, we don’t have to worry about holding your web browser hostage while we do this. We can then allow the report to be much larger than our web-based reports, with support for up to 6 months of data on many users all at once.

We’ve also designed calendar representations, totals per week, grand totals, and individual status updates all available via this report’s settings. Using these levers, any admin can create a single PDF that tells the story of how their users interacted with Simple In/Out throughout a period of time.

Powerful Exporting

Like printing, Simple In/Out has had CSV exports in the past on each individual report. Because of this, they were each restricted by the same time period barriers as the reports they were associated with. To export data over a month, or many users, admins would have to run many exports and stitch the data together behind-the-scenes. It was a lot of clicks.

The new Export report solves this problem. Similar to the Print/PDF report, we provide a number of settings that allow for a report to be created that can be downloaded when it has finished generating. We allow up to 6 months of data to be exported at any one time, and support both summaries (total time) as well as individual status updates. It’s never been easier to take your Simple In/Out data to your favorite spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel.

We know our new reports are a big addition to Simple In/Out, and we can’t wait to show you what we have in store next for Simple In/Out.