Finding things

1. Anatomy of a report

ZakERP has two kinds of list, and knowing which you are looking at saves confusion.

• A record screen — a list you open records from, to view or edit them. Employee, Leave Application, Purchase Order.
• A saved search — a report. It answers a question, and it is built for filtering, exporting and emailing rather than editing. My Attendance, Leave Register, Payables Ageing.

This chapter is about the second kind. They all share the same furniture: a period bar, a keyword box, filter pickers, sortable column headings, paging, and the export and email buttons. Not every report shows every control — a report with no dates has no period bar — but where a control appears, it behaves identically everywhere.

2. The period bar

Reports about things that happen open on a sensible default — usually the current month — and the period bar sits along the top.

3. Narrowing the list

The keyword box

Type a word and the list narrows to rows containing it. It searches across the columns on screen, so a name, a document number or a status all work. It is a filter, not a jump — the list keeps only matching rows.

Filter pickers

Where a report offers filters they appear as drop-downs above the grid — Status, Department, Year, and so on. Choosing one narrows the list; leaving it blank means "all".

Filters and the keyword box combine, and both combine with the period. If a report comes back empty, work backwards through those three before concluding the data is missing.

4. Sorting and paging

Click a column heading to sort by it; click again to reverse. Sorting applies to the whole filtered result, not just the page you are looking at — so sorting by amount and reading the top row really does give you the largest.

Long results are paged. Moving between pages keeps your period, keyword, filters and sort — you never have to set them up again.

5. Exporting

The export buttons give you the list exactly as you have filtered and sorted it — not the whole table.

6. Emailing a result

Some reports carry an Email button, which sends the result you are looking at without you exporting and attaching anything.

1. Recipient

   Required. The address the report goes to.

2. Choose how to send it
   • Send within message — the table appears in the body of the email. Best for a short result somebody will read on a phone.
   • Send as CSV, as Excel or as PDF — the result is attached in that format.
3. Comment

   Optional, and worth using. It arrives above the data, so one line saying what the recipient is looking at and why prevents a reply asking exactly that.

4. Send

   The filters you had applied are the ones that get sent. What you see is what they get.

7. Why "My…" reports show only you

Reports whose names begin with My — My Attendance, My Payslips, My Leave Applications — are locked to the person signed in. The employee code comes from your session, never from the address bar, so editing the URL cannot widen them.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Administrators are not exempt. An administrator opening My Attendance sees their own days. The company-wide equivalents are separate reports with their own names and their own permissions.
• They fail closed. If a login has no employee record behind it, a "My…" report shows nothing rather than everything. An empty My Attendance for a real employee usually means their login is not linked to their employee record — ask your administrator.

8. Printing

For a quick paper copy, export to PDF and print that — you get a fixed layout with the headings, which is what a filed copy needs. Printing the browser page directly works, but the result depends on your browser and how wide the report is.