Custom Reports in the e-RegisterNow Event Ticketing Software

This blog will be a tutorial on how to make and modify custom reports in the e-RegisterNow ticketing system.

What are Custom Reports

Custom reports are reports that allow you to select and query specific data in one report. Custom reports are typically only used when the e-RegisterNow ticketing platform does not already have a premade report that meets your needs.

Making a Custom Report

In order to make a new custom report you need to go to Reports; Custom Reports; and select the Define New Report tab. There are five different types of custom reports Transaction Reports, Registrant-Event Reports, Registrant Reports, Event Reports, and eTicket Reports.

Transaction Reports is a detailed financial report that can show cash flow with limited registrant information.

A Registrant-Event Report combines registrant and event data and is the most recommended type of custom report due to it being able to provide the greatest amount of data.

Registrant Reports allow you to see specific registrant data with limited event data.

Event Reports allow you to see specific event data with limited registrant data.

eTicket Reports allow you to see all data regarding eTickets.

After selecting which type of custom report you want to make give it a name and click on define new report.

Editing the Custom Report

The tabs at the top of the initial custom reports screen separate your different custom reports. Any custom report that is created within a M account can be accessed by anyone that has a login to the M account or the main C account (refer to the C and M accounts video for the differences between each other).

After you have created the type of custom report that you want to make, go to that report types tab. Now click on the Report Data button. This page is where you select the data that you would like to appear in your custom report. In order to populate your custom report with the data that you need to select the columns of data you would like to see by checking the check boxes in the far left column. You can then give the column a custom heading if you would like, change the type of data that it is (it is most often already the correct data type that you want), select what column you want the data to be sorted by (we recommend sorting by reference number because it will put whole transactions together), and change the order of appearance. In order to change the order of the columns it is recommended that you give each column a number. Using group is not recommended because it will group similar data together regardless of transaction.

The Report Conditions tab allows you to filter your report by specific conditions (for example you only would like to see data from the event Fan Expo Canada„ Single Pass FRIDAY only). It also allows you to lookup the event id of all of your enabled events. To do this make sure you have an event or Registrant-Event report made with Event name checked off as a field in Report Data. Now go to Report Conditions and click on new. You can now select a field that you want to filter by which is Event name in this case. *note: The field must be a field within your report data*. Then select the operator you wish to filter by which in this case it will be matches and lastly type in the value you are filtering by which will be Fan Expo Canada„ Single Pass FRIDAY only.

You can use the % symbol around the word you are searching and filtering by. Using a similar example from earlier if I want to only see events that contain the phrase Single Pass I would type %Single Pass% into the value box.

If you are sorting by date or time it must always be in the same format that e-RegisterNow uses for that field name. There are many formats that are used for different use cases. The best way to find out the exact format for the field name that you want to sort by is to generate a full report and see what the format is within its column.

An example for sorting by date would be looking for all transactions that have occurred on or before June 5, 2019. You would first make sure you have a transaction report that has Transaction date selected in Report Data. You would then generate and view a full report by going to the main Custom Reports screen and clicking Get Report Results; Create Full Report; Display Results. Now we can see that the format used in the Transaction Date column is yyyy-mm-dd. Then you would go to Report conditions and set Transaction Date as the filtering field, less than or equal to as the operator, and in the value box you would type 2019-06-05. Your report will then be filtered to only show transactions that have occurred on or before June 5, 2019.

Another example would be to filter by a specific time frame. If you wanted to filter to a specific time you would again need to use the same format as e-RegisterNow. So let’s say that you wanted to see all transactions that occurred on June 3, 2019 between 12pm and 2:30pm, you would need to setup two Report Conditions. The first would use Transaction Date as the filtering field, greater than or equal to as the operator, and 2019-06-03 12:00:00 as the value. The second condition would again use Transaction Date as the filtering field, but less than or equal to as the operator, and 2019-06-03 14:30:00 as the value. This would show all transactions that occurred on June 3, 2019 between 12pm and 2:30pm.

The Display settings tab allows you to change many settings about how your custom report looks. It allows you to change the name of the report, control how many records are displayed, if you want line numbers to be displayed beside the report, external users, if the public url is enabled and the public URL password.

The external users field is used to prevent access to the report by only allowing the users that are input into the field access to the report. Make sure you input your own name as well, otherwise you will be locked out of seeing the report. By leaving the external users field blank e-RegisterNow automatically assumes everyone that has access to this M account has access to the report.

The public URL is a URL that can be sent to someone external of e-RegisterNow and they will have access to the report provided that they have the password. The URL is exactly what is shown in the back end and the external user is NOT able to make changes to the report. An example use case of the public URL would be a sports league. Each team would be built into a custom report and each coach would be given the public URL to their teams report.

A text or .txt file of each report can be downloaded from the Display Results page. This .txt file can then be dragged and dropped into excel. After creating a Full Report you are also able to click on Download Results. On this page you have the option to download the report at an excel file, a .txt file in either tab delimited or formatted, and html file, or even an XML file.

The difference report shows the differences between two instances of a custom report. If you see the curly brace appear around the name of a custom report that means that the report data that the custom report lists has been changed. If the report data that the custom report lists has been changed (for example the Transaction Date was added) then a difference report cannot be created because the system cannot compare different columns.

Now that we know how custom reports work and our report data and conditions are setup we are able to generate our first proper custom report. So we go to our custom report on the main Custom Reports screen and click Get Report Results; Create Full Report; Display Results. We are then able to view and download the custom report.