Creating and customizing reports in Productive is designed to be both simple and flexible, allowing you to tailor insights to your specific needs.
With a few clicks, you can generate custom reports that provide valuable data for your projects and teams.
Getting Started with Reports
To begin, you have two main options:
1) Use a Predefined Report
Productive offers a variety of predefined reports available in the Reports Template Library. These can serve as quick solutions or starting points for further customization. Click on + Report in the upper right to access the templates.
2) Build a Report From Scratch
If you prefer a more tailored approach, you can build your own report from scratch. To do so, open the dropdown menu in the upper right and select "From Scratch".
3) Generate a Report With AI
In addition to building reports manually, you can also use AI Reports to speed up the process. Just describe the data you want to see in plain language, and Productive will generate a report for you.
AI Reports are ideal when you’re not sure where to start or want to quickly explore trends, patterns, or metrics across your workspace. You can further customize the report after it’s created—just like any other report in Productive.
4) Use Polaris for Advanced Reporting
If you need full control over how your data is queried and combined, Polaris lets you write custom SQL queries and build powerful reports across teams, departments, and organizations. It’s ideal for users with SQL knowledge looking for deeper insights.
Building a Report from Scratch
Select "From Scratch"
Start by choosing "From scratch" from the menu.
Choose Data Types
Next, decide which type of data you want to include in your report. Productive allows you to extract data from various sources, including:
Bills: Track and report on bills from purchase orders.
Bookings: Analyze scheduled work, booked hours, and capacity usage, including absence bookings.
Budgets: Get insights into revenue, costs, and profitability at the budget level.
Capacity & Availability: Review how much available time each person or team has.
Companies: Report on your clients or leads (data from CRM > Companies).
Cost Rates: Access internal cost rates used for profitability and margin tracking (data from the users' salary information).
Deals: Track your sales pipeline, deal values, and stages.
Expenses: View submitted expenses.
Financial Items: Combine multiple financial sources in one place (budgets, invoices, expenses, etc.), including future bookings, to gauge your profitability.
Invoice Line Items: Break down invoiced amounts by each line item in an invoice.
Invoices: Track sent and paid invoices, invoice dates, and totals.
Overtime/Undertime: Monitor logged time that exceeds or falls short of capacity, used in overhead cost calculations.
Payments: Report on incoming payments tied to invoices
Payroll: Overview of your team's salaries.
People: See data related to your team, permission sets, departments, and status.
Projects: Report on project progress, stages, last activity, profit, and margins.
Purchase Orders: Report on purchase orders, including the PO numbers, vendors, status, delivery and issue dates.
Rates: View rate cards per company.
Services: Track time, revenue, cost, and profit for services in budgets.
Tasks: Review status, progress, time, and last activities for tasks in projects.
Time Entries: Analyze time entries, including worked and billable time, time entry approval status, and cost for services in budgets.
Time Off Allocations: Report on time off balances and allocations per person.
📌 Note: The availability of certain data sources may depend on your permission level within Productive.
Customizing Your Report
Tips for Customization
Define your primary reporting objectives before selecting data sources.
Use filters to refine your report by time periods, specific projects, or financial metrics.
Employ grouping options to organize data for clearer insights and presentation.
After selecting your data, you can customize the report to fit your specific needs. For detailed instructions on how to tailor your report, follow this customization guide.
Learn More
For more insights into creating effective reports in Productive, check out our comprehensive guide on popular report insights here.
Reports Webinar
For real-time examples and practical use cases, watch our Reports Webinar. This webinar provides a hands-on demonstration of the reporting features and offers tips on maximizing the benefits of Productive's reporting tools.