Creating custom reports
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Before you start working with custom reports, make sure to check the Generating pay equity reports article to discover how to navigate the general reporting section within PayAnalytics, how to generate standard reports from your dataset, and in certain cases analysis, how to make use of the built-in mandatory government reports for local compliance.
As no organization is the same, you may have specific reporting needs and requirements that exceed the built-in reports. To support you, PayAnalytics’ reporting section includes a feature to generate your own custom reports.
In this article, the following actions will be covered:
For more information about creating custom reports, see the following video:
To create a brand new report, proceed as follows:
From your PayAnalytics navigation, head to Reports, and select the relevant Dataset or Analysis to serve as a basis for your custom report, as illustrated on the following picture:
Reports page
Click Create New Report and select Empty by clicking on the report icon to start from scratch, using a blank template as shown on the following picture:
Opening empty report
Depending on your general settings, you may enter the report in either view or edit mode. If not already the case, click You are viewing button, and select Edit mode to start building your custom report, as shown in the following illustration:
Activating edit mode
To give your report a name, click on the icon next to the default “Unnamed report (#)” title, a pop-up box will appear. Type your chosen name in the text field and click Update, as shown in the following illustration:
Naming a report
Use a descriptive name that will help you (and others) in the future to understand the scope and use case of the report.
Once your blank report has been created and has a title, you must add to it at least one section. Click on the icon in the left pane of the report to add a new section. as shown in the following picture:
Adding a new section to the report
A new default configured section will automatically appear on the right pane.
Edit the section title by clicking on the icon to the right of the default section title “Section #” and make your update accordingly.
Once you have more than one section in the report, you can reorder them by selecting the icon. The icon allows you to choose a different input variable, which will be applied to all current sections in the report. The icons are shown in the following illustration:
Additional actions
Customizing your data, display & filters
To customize the section to meet your reporting needs, you can update/edit the default section configurations. Click on button open Settings page and click on the OPEN arrow on the right of the section pane.
Within settings, you have the following options:
Selected variable - the key data point you wish to visualize from available columns (numerical variables) in your data, this may be Total Compensation before raises, Raises, Total Compensation after raises, or any other data point from your Employee List.
Group by – select the categories by which you want to organize your employee data, such as country, legal entity, etc. You can also choose numerical variables and apply grouping methods like defined brackets, quartiles, or deciles.
Chart type - the display options of the data in chart form, by default it is set to a vertical bar chart, but you have the option to select Marimekko, bubble charts, horizontal bar, and others.
Aggregate by - the statistical descriptive of the selected variable, by default set to calculate the average, and options to select from minimum, maximum, various percentiles, median, total, and headcount.
Organize data by - the demographic variable you can to use to break down your data, most commonly we see gender used here, however, you can use any demographic variable configured in your dataset, or even the option to not organize the data by a demographic variable. This option can only be applied when more than one demographic variable is included in the dataset.
Demographic group - the demographic group for display in your graph, which can be all groups within your selected demographic variable (e.g. male, female, non-binary, not reported) or only a subset (e.g. male, female) depending on your selection.
The Settings section is presented on the following illustration:
Settings section
You can also apply filters to your data in reports. The filtering is based on the employee table and allows you to filter out employees based on specific criteria (columns), for example, their job role. Note that to use filters you have to be in Edit Mode. We support the following ways of filtering:
A global filter that applies to all sections of a report. Head to the full-width bar at the bottom of the screen and click Display Filter to open the employee table and apply filters to any or multiple columns, for example, Job Role.
A local filter for a specific section of the report. Within the section head to Employee Filter and click Open arrow on the right to open up the local employee table and apply filters to any or multiple columns, for example Location.
Employee Filter section is illustrated in the following picture:
Employee Filter section
Adding simple text context or use the advanced wizard
To add context to your section and a summary description of the graph data and takeaways, you can add text to your report sections. Text can be added before the graph, after, or both.
Simple text description
To add simple text, click the Open arrow next to the text section you’d like to add, type your text in the text field that opens up, format the text, and click Save Changes. You can preview the text in the Text preview section to ensure it meets your requirements, as shown on the following illustration:
Adding simple text
Advanced dynamic text
The Template expression wizard allows you to add dynamic calculations from your dataset to the text in a report. The wizard helps you build your calculation and the wizard text can be added/ used in the text field within a section of your report.
The following fields are available within the expression wizard, some of which are required and others are optional, depending on the type of calculation you need:
Data selection (required) - indicate the basis on of the data on which you want to do the calculations. Here you can choose the dataset as a whole or a subset of the dataset based on either global or local filtering. If you are working on a report for an analysis you can also choose the analysis results.
Filter variable (optional) - if you are looking at the data (or a subset of it), you can choose a Filter field, for example, the demographic variables or categorical variables in your data. This is an optional filtering if you want to calculate something for a specific category in your data, e.g. a specific job role.
Selected variable - the data columns (numerical variable) you would like to perform the calculation on, e.g. total salary, value points, or adjusted pay gap.
Aggregate configuration (required) - select the type of calculations to be performed on your selected variable. For example, you can choose to calculate the average, percentiles, min, or max of the total salary.
Template expression wizard is illustrated in the following picture:
Template expression wizard
Once you have completed the expression wizard, click Add to text to automatically copy the calculation into your text field. Preview the expression within your text to ensure it is a valid and meaningful expression. Click Save Changes to close the creation process.
Saving your custom report as a new template for re-use
Once you've created your custom report, you have the option to save it as a template for future use, allowing you to quickly apply the same structure to other datasets. To do so, simply select Edit or create template from the options menu, as illustrated in the following picture:
Options menu
This will enable you to easily reuse the report layout and configurations without having to start from scratch each time.