Reports and Metrics: which to use
Audience: managers and analysts reading performance data, and operations staff investigating a specific order. You need: Sales reports for Reports, Metrics for Metrics. They are separate permissions.
The console has two data areas, and picking the right one saves a lot of time.
| Reports | Metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | "How did we do?" | "What happened to this order?" |
| Shape | Aggregated — totals, breakdowns, trends | Per-order — logs, timelines |
| Period | A business date or a date range | Recent activity |
| Typical reader | Management, analysts, area managers | Support, operations, anyone investigating |
If you are looking at numbers, you want Reports. If you are looking for one order's history, you want Metrics.
What's in Reports
| Report | Answers |
|---|---|
| Sales | Revenue over the period |
| Product sales | Which articles sold, grouped by family |
| Promotions | How much each promotion was used |
| Sales by trend | Monday-to-Sunday pattern, by category |
| Operations | Live-ish operational picture: order states, staff on shift, load over the day, individual orders |
| Operational alerts | Stores currently outside a threshold you set |
What's in Metrics
| View | Answers |
|---|---|
| Order logs | Which orders had activity, and what was done to them |
| Order timeline | The full sequence of actions on one order |
| Archived alarms | Alarms already dealt with |
Permissions
| To do this | You need |
|---|---|
| Open any report | Sales reports |
| Open order logs and timelines | Metrics |
| Export from Metrics | Metrics — export, a separate and higher permission |
| See archived alarms | Archived alarms |
report_viewer is the role built for this: reports, metrics and store visibility, nothing else. It combines well with an operational role — see Common role combinations.
Everything is scoped
Every figure is filtered to your scope before you see it. Two colleagues running the same report on the same day can legitimately get different totals, because they can see different stores or brands.
This is the single most common "the report is wrong" report, and it usually isn't. See How scope works in practice before investigating further.
The pages in this chapter
| Topic | Page |
|---|---|
| Filters, dates and the dashboard | Filters, dates and favourites |
| Revenue | Sales report |
| Articles sold | Product sales report |
| Promotion usage | Promotions report |
| Weekly patterns | Sales by trend |
| The operations screen | Operations report |
| Threshold-based store alerts | Operational alerts |
| One order's history | Order logs and timelines |
| Getting data out | Exporting data |