Review: Reports Module

Reports Module is one of the most successful activeCollab related products developed outside A51. Creators of the reports Module are Nirav Mehta and his crew from the AppsMagnet company. 

As the name it self refers to, this module’s basic purpose is to generate different kinds of reports based on the data you already have in your activeCollab. 

After buying (for the price of $69) and installing (it’s simple, just follow the instructions from readme.txt), Reports Module will be available on the system level. Only people you allow to will be able to access and create reports that you let them to create. 

Reports module can create reports based on three criteria:

1. Project 

Project reports, for all projects, or some particular project, are displayed graphically as charts that shows:

• burn downs - open items in your projects over time. The higher the trend is the more work you’ve left to do. 
• hours - allows you to track relation between estimated hours and actual time that’s been logged. Estimated hours will be visible only if you’re using the Planning Module (developed by AppsMagnet, as well) because activeCollab doesn’t support this feature. 
• work summary - displays opened and completed items based on the category they belong to. 

Besides charts, you can see some general data related to your projects, such as the preview of opened and completed items, amount of hours spent, percentage of the closed items, upcoming Milestone and Velocity. Velocity is, according to Nirav, rate of completion of your projects. 

An interesting addition are Most Active & Open and Longest open list of items. It can point you to some of the forgotten Tickets, or unfinished Checklists. 

2. People 

This criteria allows you to see individual reports for every person with an account in your activeCollab. 

Displayed as report cards, this reports will enable you to see what that person is responsible for, how active she was, where exactly is she assigned and how much working hours has she logged. 

This tool should help you manage people you’re working with and give you a close insight in productivity rate of your team. 

3. Companies 

In this section you can see full report for you Company related items in activeCollab. Here you can see how many projects you have opened, how many user you have, how many items you have opened and closed on the system level. Also, you can see some basic data for each of your projects here. 

If you wish to list this information for one of the Client companies you can easily do that by choosing the Company you wish. 

Reports module can be a very useful and handy tool, especially if you're working with clients and great number of people. Everything is accessible easily, available at one place, and simple to set up.