Access CRM enables users to generate detailed reports on various entities, such as orders and contacts. These reports can be customised using filters, grouping options, and other tools to meet specific business requirements.

CRM reports can be utilised to analyse customer purchasing behaviour and identify trends, such as spotting customers who have stopped buying specific products or analysing monthly purchasing patterns.

The Report Builder allows you to create your own bespoke Reports based on data within the CRM. These Reports can be exported, saved and shared with other CRM users. Plus, Contact and Company Reports can be used to build target Contact lists for your Spotler or Mailchimp campaigns.

If you encounter challenges while building reports, such as confusion about which data or fields to use, Access CRM offers support to guide you. Our team is available to review your report setup and provide advice to ensure you achieve your desired outcomes.

Our CRM has a fresh new look! This video shows the old interface, so some layouts and element locations may differ from the CRM you know today.

If you've clicked on a specific Report Group like Sales Reports (rather than Shared Reports), you'll still get the following tabs, but the results under each tab will be filtered to that Report Group only, i.e. only the sales-based Reports like Quotes, Orders & Opportunities.

You can create a new Report by either clicking the "New Report" button from the All Reports page.

You can also create a report using the Global Create button.

You can select to create your report from an existing template or to start the report from scratch.

Selecting "Use a Template" allows you to create a report based on an existing report template. Templates provide a predefined structure, including columns, filters, grouping, and other settings, helping you save time and maintain consistency across reports. Once a template has been selected, you can review and modify the report configuration as required before generating the report.

Selecting "Start from Scratch" allows you to build a new report from the ground up. You will first be prompted to choose the entity you want to report on. Once the entity has been selected, you can configure the report by choosing the required columns, applying filters, setting grouping options, and defining any other report criteria to meet your specific requirements.

You may wish to select a template if you know you already have a report that is close to the one you are planning to create. For example, you may already have a report showing customers in Europe and may want to create a new report showing customers from this template showing customers in America. Starting the report from your European Customers report and just adjusting the filters would complete the new report.

Selecting to use a template will allow you to choose an existing report to start building the report from. This will not change the configuration of the existing report but will create a new report with the same fields, filters and grouping applied as existing report.

You can filter down the list of report by the Report Group to only show the type of reports that you are interested in. You can also use the search to search for an existing report.

When you're creating a new report from scratch you will need to choose the entity you want to report on. It's not always easy to know which entity to start from. And of course, if you don't choose the right base entity, the Report just isn't going to give you the data you expected. So, to help with this, the initial selection window displays a description of each entity and a preview of the first 10 rows of data in that table. This should give you a better idea of which entity contains the data you're looking for.

As there are hundreds of entities within the CRM, we've added an entity filter so that only the entities relating to the selected options will show. In this example selecting 'Activity' has filtered the entities to show common entities used when creating an activity report.

In this example, we'd like to create a Sales Report, so we've selected the 'Opportunity' entity to start on. This has loaded the first 10 entries in the preview window. Alternatively, for sales-specific reporting, you might consider starting with the 'Sales Transaction' entity. This entity is particularly useful for analysing posted invoices and includes fields like 'Invoice Number' and 'Invoice Date'.

Now that we've selected our entity, the Report Builder will list all fields relating to that entity in a tree-like view. Along the top of the screen will be the columns. The order in which the columns appear can be changed by dragging and dropping the field names into the desired place. In this example, we've chosen 5 columns: 'Description', 'Current Status', 'Estimated Close', 'Created' and 'Account Manager Name'. A preview of the first 3 lines from the report is shown to give a helpful understanding of how the report columns will be displayed.

Simply type in the name of the field, and the search will filter down the results to try and match what you're looking for. Simply tick the box next to the field you'd like to include in your Report, and select 'Update Fields'.

Once happy with your chosen columns, click 'Next'. 

To add a filter to your Report, click on the further options (three dots) and select 'Filters'. Alternatively, you can access the filter panel by clicking the funnel icon on the toolbar. Use the "Choose Filters (+)" option to search for filters like date ranges, customer groups, or product categories.

By default, standard report entities will have the 'Status Flag' filter applied and set to remove any deleted records. Here, you can see the filter is applied and set to remove any deleted Opportunities. Add more filters by clicking the green 'Add Filters' button, and choose the entities you'd like to filter your Report on.

For example, to include unposted invoices, create a separate SalesTransaction report and apply a filter with the criteria: Transaction Type = Draft Invoice. This allows you to manage draft invoices separately from posted ones. Or, to exclude deleted invoices, you can manually apply a filter with the criteria: Status Flag > Is not > Deleted. This ensures that only active records are displayed in your report.

You can filter on any field which relates to the pre-selected entity. In this example, we've applied a filter of 'Account Manager', which is underneath the Company level in the hierarchy. By ticking this option, we can now choose which Account Managers to filter this report by.
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By ticking one of the Account Managers in the list, the Report results will change based on this filter, leaving only Opportunities assigned to this particular Account Manager.

Once happy with your selected filters, click 'Continue'.

You can also individually configure each column to sort data, add filters, add/remove columns, or modify the column's properties (e.g. change the format of the date). Simply hover over the column name that you want to edit and click on the further options menu (three dots to the right) to get the drop-down of options to edit this column.

To save the Report, simply navigate to the save icon in the top right-hand corner. You can then give the Report a name, and select whether you wish to share this with other CRM users or save it just for your own use.

You can also decide which Report Group you'd like to save this into. Storing Reports in a logical place will make it easier for other users to find them going forward.

Simply hover over a Report and click the star icon to add it to your Favourites for super quick and easy access!

Private icons appear on the Report list in the group view, meaning you can quickly and easily see which reports only you can access and make changes to. Any Reports without an icon are shared, so the whole team can access them, add filters, overwrite changes, etc.

If you wish to make a private Report public for all Users to view, you can do so using the 'Make Public' option in the further options menu in the right-hand corner of the report.

The 'Reset to Public' option on a Report is used for resetting your privately saved version of a default report back to the Public version.