Allow scheduled reports to be setup

On reports (eg View Clients) there is an option for 10 - 50 items per page. If I export the report to a CSV I only get my first 50 customers because it won’t process the other pages. There needs to be an option to run a report across the whole customer file and the easiest way to achieve that would be to add 9999 to the drop down box so that all customers are reported on one page.

It would also be helpful (but require more coding) to allow reports to be customized by adding or removing columns (although that is why I’m exporting to Excel, so I can manipulate further)

Hi Scooby_7, many people asked this before for different kind of reports. The answer is always the same: load time and load performance. If all quickfile customers request reports with 1000 lines or so it would add to much pressure on the server. I think, the only report which allows more than 50 lines is recurring invoices (up to 150 lines).
You could do an account backup, which will send all your data via email to you. You can then pick the data you need and open it in Libreoffice or excel and change it to meet your needs. To make things easier the next time, you could record a macro. I do it this way. It is a bit of work the first time but every time afterwards just one click. Hope this helps a bit

It does help in that its a work around, but that reason is not really a valid justification.

For a start, the server demand is greater if I have to run 5 sets of reports (1 for each page of customers) than if I could do it once

Secondly, its not something most users would do regularly and you could discourage it in the code eg when the user changes the drop down to “all customers” introduce a delay of 5 minutes. That way users will use the feature sparingly

Finally, It’s a revenue opportunity …I would pay extra for that facility or make it only available to subscribed users (which I am)

And another thing…that’s not even how the server is processing the query string. I have 250 customers (roughly 5 pages of 50). If I select Advanced search and tick PREPAYMENTS, I get the default order for page 1…BUT…if I then click the column heading to sort by Prepayments, the sort brings in customers from all 5 pages, it does not just sort the data on the page. This means that the data set already includes all the data so there is no server performance issue to let me display it all on the screen

If you poll the server to bring up 50 entries, that’s one poll with a reduced server load. Each page of 50 are seperate polls to the server. Because it only has to cycle through 50 entries.

If you polled the server for 1000 that is more server load because it has to cycle through 1000 as well as all the ascociated tables to match each entry.

If you click the column to sort the order, it’s only polling the database for the first 50 in the order you specify. It’s not pulling 5 pages of data

So are you saying that 20 polls of 50 each time is in some way a lower load than 1 poll of 1000?? And are you also saying that each time the data is resorted, it is refetching the data table…otherwise, the dataset must be already downloaded

Yes it is…my customers are all called Flat001…Flat250 . Page 1 only has 1 - 50 listed, but when I sort by Prepayment as described above, I get Flat 179…Flat 086 etc which are entries which are not listed on page 1

It’s a bit hard to explain how retrieving data from a database works, and I don’t know how qf have coded it. But essentially you’d first have a call to count the number of rows, which populates the page indexes. Then you’d have one to retrieve data based on a specific order.

So when you see page one if it’s in date order its calling the first 50 rows in order of date. If you specify another sorting order. It calls the data based on that.

If you were to retrieve all data, its the length of time it takes to retrieve it that causes server load, not the amount of smaller calls that are made.

Yes I see…it is doing that. Something like the OrderBy keyword in SQL. Even so, the point stands that it could be offered to those who pay. I recently moved several sites to a new host (Hostinger) - they have a great system which is cheaper than most, but then I found out their email is limited to 50/day and that’s a deal breaker so I’m moving on. All companies need to offer the services people need (and it sounds like I’m not the first to raise this) and then price accordingly.

Hi @Scooby_7

As @Paul_Courtier rightfully mentioned, it does come down to performance. One thing we pride ourselves on is ensure our platform is as quick and as stable as possible, and anything that could disrupt this needs to be considered very carefully.

We did trial extending some of the limits to 150 per page, which is available to those with a Power User Subscription.

There is another thread on this which may be of interest, specifically the posts from my colleague @Glenn: 50 transaction paging limit

Thanks, I can see the 150 on the bank statement now. I will try the back ups and see what that gives me. One option might be (like Pandle) to look at allowing customised reports to be scheduled so that the data is sent at a time when the server load has capacity. I think most users could live with that as they can still generate the reports they need without having to resort to manual cut & paste

It would even help if there was an option to display the button at the top of the screen. At present I have to scroll to the bottom of the 50 before I can access the next page

While there isn’t pagination at the top of the page, there is an option to move to the previous and next pages:
image

Hope that helps! :slight_smile:

No there isn’t … and all my customers start with F :unamused:

I tried the backup route and it does give me exactly what I need so I can use that (although if anything I’m now more of a server load because a report I might have called 4 times a year is now being emailed to me along with a lot more information which I don’t need, on a weekly basis)

Like I say…perhaps if users could request a report and have it queued to be sent when the server has capacity

Hi @Scooby_7

We’ve extended the page size options to 100 and 150 on the client and supplier views, this will go live in the next couple of days.

We can look into scheduled reports, it wouldn’t be a major problem to support that. We pull backups and reports now from database snapshots rather than the live database, so performance is less of an issue.

We planned to eventually remove the weekly backup option, and leave the monthly option. In exchange we could then setup a scheduled report which allowed users to specify what data they need and how often.

Edit:

Hope you don’t mind but I’ve updated the title of this post and marked as “Planned”.

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That’s great and very responsive of you :smiley: