CiviReport a thought planned to overcome one of the shortcomings of CiviCRM to have a featured Reporting Functionality has indeed taken CiviCRM to altitudes.

CiviReport was initiatied based on the success of Custom Search, designed with 14 report templates the birth of CiviReport was with the release of CiviCRM 2.2.7 and each of the 14 reports covered a specific reporting area which included individuals Contact Details, Contribution, Memberships and Events.

Let me give you a short instance as to why this feature was so much awaited and what I meant by saying that it was one of the shortcomings of CiviCRM

Refined Search Criteria:

The Search Criteria is much more precised and has been designed taking into account each small data that a end user can look for. Following is a search Criteria for Donor Report(Summary) template using which we can define our search.

 
An important point to note here are the date fields having relative ranges (This Year, Previous Year, This Month, This Quarter, etc.), which makes the report more precised.

Statistical results:

Lets say if we kept all the criteria as is (the defaults) and tried generating a report for all the contributions made this year the result obtained is something as follows.The Result is supported with a statistics which helps with an overall view.

Bar-graph and Pie Chart Results:

Now comes the “WOW Factor” of reports, the result for most of the reports along with being available in a tabular format have also been made available in bar graph and a pie chart format, the scenario in this case becomes a clear picture of the contribution made

More Features :

• The feature list further includes “Add Contacts to Group feature” which adds all the contacts listed as a result of the report to a particular group and this is further useful to perform various actions on the group viz. Sending emails, creating mailing labels by navigating to that group.

 

 

• Also CiviReport has “Automated report delivery” where you can configure reports to be delivered to more than one recipients via email and these details is to be filled in the report Settings section. Your site admin will need to create and schedule a cron task to invoke the new "CiviReportMail.php" script.

 

 

• A big feature of CiviReport is the “Create Report Option” which allows you to save your report result which thus prevents you from defining the search criteria if you wish to see the same result again with same criteria. The Create Report option looks as shown in the image below. User can also give specific permissions while creating a report.

Bricks and Brats:

The Development of CiviReports was not hurdle free. One of the Major problems we faced was the Browser Session Problem which was due to a unique url being used to display different instances of reports and the point of differentiation was the id being appended, this was then overcome by having the id itself as a part of the url which made it non-unique. Ex.      Initially:: http://sitename/CiviCRM/report/instance?id=3&reset=1              (Unique Url)
            Now :: http://sitename/CiviCRM/report/instance/3?reset=1

But after all the hardwork, the community has highly appreciated CiviReport in its phase 1 release

"Mr Peter Davis" said
“This looks like a great step forward and will make CiviCRM of much more interest to organisations that are used to the fundraising reporting potential of commercial products they are used to.”

There are many more advancements and many new reports already planned for the phase 2 release which would take place with the release of Civivrm 3.0 release.

You can see a demo of the contribution reports on the sandbox server: http://sandbox.CiviCRM.org/CiviCRM/report/contribute/summary?reset=1&force=1 http://sandbox.CiviCRM.org/CiviCRM/report/contribute/detail?reset=1&force=1