Resource Planning Best Practices: Reports

For the times when it’s time to stop planning and start doing, resource management reports are generated and brought out on the table. It could be for archive filing purposes, for presenting to a board of investors, for briefing your team or informing the finance department to issue out paycheques according to the hours that your team has worked.

The report feature is one of our users’ favorites. Below are the steps to creating a report, you will see how it can provide value for resource planning needs of all kinds. The location to add a new resource planning report is located in the ‘ADD NEW’ button on the left corner of the planner and in the Reports list. Click on ‘Report’ from the ‘ADD NEW’ menu for the quickest way to add a new resource planning report.

A new tab will pop up. Name your report on the top of the tab. The Report fields tab is where you customize the data in your report by selecting data fields into sorting levels. The data fields are categorized as task data, project data and resource data. A new data type has recently been added, called Calculations. Drag and drop the data labels to either grouping or details level.

By default, the reports are task-driven. Generating a task-driven will exclude any resources and project that do not have any tasks in the time period you have chosen for your report. A resource-driven report will include all the resources, even if they do not have any tasks. A project-driven report will include all the active projects, even if they don’t have any tasks in that particular time period. 

Above is how it looks like when you have the customizations set and clicked ‘Apply’. Your report will have your data generated according to your grouping level and details level. If you want to use the report you have created as a template, do not forget to save the report.

Click on ‘Print’ to print your report directly from the planner. The format of the print will look as above.

Click on ‘Save as CSV’ to download it in CSV. It will be exported into the format above – plain text distributed across columns and rows.  

Saving as PDF will appear in the structure above, similar to the report format on the planner itself.

To open up an existing resource planning report template, click on the ‘Reports’ button. All the templates you have saved will be displayed in a list. You can open any template and update the date selection to generate a new and up-to-date report.

Furthermore, you can automate the reporting process and receive the report in your mailbox whenever you need it – daily, weekly or monthly. You can also send the report to any of the stakeholders.

Our users use reports for various purposes. Among the common uses are, managers generating reports for each employee to as a guide to what’s coming up next in the week or month. Some employees have access to generate the report themselves. HR export data revolving capacity utilization for time-based wages and so on, so forth.

As you have seen, the report feature is built to allow an unlimited number of customizations with its drag-and-drop data labels function.

To give Ganttic’s report a try, sign up for a free 14-day unlimited account. When your trial expires, if your resource count is under 10, your account remains free. What are you waiting for?

Author: Patricia Goh