We on the Fulcrum team are very pleased to announce a brand-new Report Builder that dramatically enhances your ability to create and deliver professional, error-free reports to your internal or external constituents.
Fulcrum’s default reports have been a workhorse for many of our clients over the years, and many customers have called on our Professional Services team to create custom reports that help them in specific use cases. We know that there are additional capabilities you need, though, and with the release of Report Builder we’ve made significant improvements in several ways:
- Creating a no-code Basic option that delivers control over a variety of important report features through a simple user experience
- Delivering an Advanced option that provides complete control over every aspect of a report, including formatting, data integration, and other sophisticated requirements
- Providing better layout defaults for clearer information rendering
Getting down to basics
Basic Reports are quantum leap forward in information delivery with Fulcrum. Basic provides a great deal of flexibility without requiring users to know any code.
Cover pages
Many of you have asked us to provide an attractive cover page for reports — but with different ideas about what that might mean. To satisfy a range of requirements, we’ve provided a cover page facility that uses push-button and fill-in-the-blank options to customize it to your needs. Among other things, you can:
- Use the first image in the record on the cover page
- Display a map of the area being inspected, including roadmap, terrain, satellite, or hybrid
- Include metadata such as the creator, assignee, location, and status
- Display or omit the application name, description, and image
Field visibility options
If you’ve ever wanted to have multiple versions of a report — one with a reduced amount of information for public or client dissemination, for example, and another with all of the details for internal use — you know how important it is to control what fields end up on your report. With a click, you can now choose what to show in any report — and what to leave out. (But don’t worry: Those fields that you’ve defined as “hidden” won’t appear in any report, regardless of settings.)
Other formatting and information options
You can now control a variety of formatting options and decide what will show up on a report. For instance, you can now:
- Choose from among a number of page sizes in landscape or portrait orientation
- Include timestamps, the record ID, default representations of null fields, and more
- Apply your team’s icon and address to the footer
- Decide whether to show Repeatable markers
Given all of these possibilities, it’s easy to make multiple report types that fit different situations. Using sample data, I created three reports for a building inspection app.
The first was a bare-bones, “did I pass or not?” report with the name, address, time, status, and inspector information (including signature). This one-pager is perfect for documenting a pass/fail result to someone who just wants the answer.
The second was a detailed report that contained all of the inspected items, but didn’t have a cover page. It’s perfect for internal consumption and documentation.
The third was a report that I might send to an external client, with a cover page showing their facility and all of the appropriate information — but, using the Field Visibility functionality I show above, I’ve hidden a field that I use internally to store a drone video of the building.
This was all done without jumping into code, using only the field types that are available to you now in Fulcrum and a graphical interface to make your selections.
Getting advanced
Some of you will want complete control over every aspect of your reports. That has previously only been available through our professional services organization. Advanced Reports open up a whole new world of capabilities to you.
Using the power of Embedded JavaScript, or EJS, Advanced Reports provides the core template used in Basic and enables you to customize every aspect of it. The full power of the underlying engine is there, including expressions, API calls, CSS formatting — you name it.
Customers who want us to create a custom report first can then maintain their report with easy-to-find JavaScript skills. If you already have those skills in place, then deploying your own reports is straightforward and can be managed completely within the Fulcrum interface.
Making data matter
With its focus on mobile data collection, the Fulcrum team has always endeavored to create context that improves program efficiency through better data collection and sharing, increases internal/external client satisfaction with fewer data errors, and decreases the complexity of report delivery by making sure all of your data is in one place.
Our delivery of more sophisticated reporting capabilities continues in that tradition. If you want to understand how powerful Fulcrum reporting can be, you might like these customer stories:
Carrington Risk, where advanced reporting has reduced the time it takes to write up the results of their surveys and inspections by 66%.
Trimat Testing, where Fulcrum reduced the time needed to generate reports, which led to a virtuous cycle: decreased cost and faster reports to customers, which meant faster payments, and increased time by inspectors in the field to deliver even more revenue.
Available now
We hope you’re as excited as we are with this new development. You can get started with it today: The Basic Report Builder is available on all Fulcrum plans and the Advanced Report Builder is available on Professional & Enterprise plans.
Check it out! If you need more, see the Learning Portal.