Report Builder 

RevenueStory comes with over 150+ ready-made reports and dashboards that helps you derive insights on the New Sales, Payments collected, MRR, Activations, Churn, and so on. Report Builder is a powerful capability that allows you to create your own reports. The information in Chargebee is remodelled as data sources (tables) thereby enabling you to visualize any data that you want as insightful reports. Using this feature, you can transform raw data into actionable insights.

You can create Summary or Detailed Reports using the fields (columns) from different data sources.

Note

Report Builder(basic) is available only on Starter, Performance, and Enterprise plans. To know more, visit our plans and pricing  page.

Understanding Data Sources 

The data in Chargebee is remodeled and stored as Data Sources. Data Sources are tables with which you can create reports. Each of these Data Sources has multiple fields (columns).

Chargebee offers the following data sources:

  • Coupons
  • Credit Notes
  • Customers
  • Invoices
  • Orders
  • Payments
  • Products
  • Refunds
  • Subscriptions

Visual Report 

A Visual Report is a graphical representation of your key business metrics with advanced visualization. You can build it by selecting fields from one or more data sources to view the report on various dimensions. Further, break the data as per your requirement and apply aggregation. View instant previews while building the report, without having to wait and generate the report to view it.

Visual Reports are similar to Business Intelligence reports with superior data visualizations. For example, you can build a visual report to view the Total MRR monthly trend by subscription currency, or to track the Active paid subscriptions across all months for specific customers.

Building Visual Reports using Metrics 

In addition to building reports based on data sources, you can build visual reports using various metrics. Metrics help you track key performance indicators driving your organization's revenue like active subscriptions, signups, activations, or churn. Creating a visual report using these metrics allows you to further analyze these metrics from other dimensions, and do a deep dive into the data by breaking them or aggregating them on various parameters to derive key inferences.

The Visual Reports feature is currently in early access. Contact Us to join the Early Adopter Program and enable this feature.

Creating a Visual Report 

To create a visual report on your Chargebee site, follow the steps below:

  1. Click RevenueStory > Report Builder.

  2. Click Build New Report and click Visual Report to build a new report. You can also use an existing template by clicking Choose a template to customize and save time. Select a template that's closer to your required report, make changes to customize it, and save the report.

  3. Click the +Add field under Values, and select the data source using which you'd like to build the report. Then, select the fields from the selected data source.

    In addition to the data sources, click the Metrics tab to view only Metrics and select from the available Metrics.

    To build the report on the Current MRR by business verticals, select the data source Subscriptions and field Current MRR in values.

  4. With each step, you can click the Preview Report on the preview pane to view the report structure changes.

  5. Under X-axis, you can select a field for the other dimension of the report by which you want to categorize the data. This could be a list of values that can serve as categories; or dates that help you see the trend of a metric in your report. To build the report on the Current MRR by business verticals, select the data source Customers and field Business vertical.

  6. Under Break by, select how you want to break this data. For example, you can break this report by specific regions, currencies, or plans. The Report Builder will automatically select the best visualization type based on the fields selected, so the users are aware of the changes that happen automatically.

  7. You can change the visualization type to be Line(Line/Spline), Bar(Bar/Stacked Bar/Stacked Bar 100%), Area(Area/Area Spline), Pie(Pie/Donut), or Scatter chart.

  8. Click Filter > Add Filter to filter the report based on various attributes.

  9. Set a Title to save the newly created visual report and click Build Report.

The following screenshot displays what the report would look like.

You can perform the following actions on the preview pane:

  • Filter: You can filter the report using the fields in the data sources.
  • Schedule: You can select the report and share it with the users added to your Chargebee site. When you schedule a report, the users you have added to the schedule will receive an email with the updated report.
  • Download CSV: You can download the report that you have created as a CSV file.
  • Edit Report: After you have created the report you can edit it to include or remove fields.
  • Visualization Types: You can change the visualization type to be Line, Bar, Area, Pie, or Scatter chart.

Datamarks Restriction 

While building a report by selecting high cardinality fields with a large set of values such as Subscription ID, Invoice ID, and so on, the report preview takes into account only a subset of values to display a limited set of data points. This limits performance issues and ensures an optimum experience for all users irrespective of their site's data volumes.

For example, consider the monthly trend of Subscription level MRR using visual reports. Suppose there are about 20,000 subscription records and associated history of the last 12 months. In this case, there are effectively 240,000 data points to be displayed.

When you try creating such a report in the visual report's editor, you will not see the entire data, and only up to limited data points will be displayed in the preview. It displays an error message when the data points are too large as shown below.

To view the desired data, try filtering out unnecessary records or use low cardinality fields, with a small number of unique values in your report. You can also try downloading the data as CSV to view the entire data.

Detailed Report 

A Detailed Report is a tabular report that contains records at an individual level. Detailed Reports can be built by selecting fields from one or more data source.

This type of report is most useful when you want to view the underlying data in detail. For example, if you want to list all Payment Due invoices by the country or view the active subscriptions in a particular plan.

Like we discussed earlier, Chargebee has the following data sources that you can use to create this report.

Of these data sources, Products and Coupons are not connected with any other data source. Therefore if you select them, you can create reports only by using their corresponding fields.

In case if you select a different data source, then you will be able to combine the data source with the other data sources that fall within the linear path of the tree (refer the image above).

For example: Let us say that you select ‘Subscriptions' as your first data source.

Then, all the data sources that are linear to it will be available for you.

Going by our example, you can further select Customers, Payments, Invoices and Refunds.

If you select Invoices as the next data source then you can use the fields from Customers, Orders or Credit Notes.

Creating a Detailed Report 

  1. Click RevenueStory > Report Builder.

  2. Choose Create a Detailed Report.

  3. Choose the data sources using which you'd like to create the report. Then, select the fields you need from each of the selected data sources. To build the report shown in our example, select Country from Customers data source, Invoice ID, Due Date, Amount Due, and Status from the Invoices data source, and Subscription ID from Subscriptions data source.

  4. Click Build Report.

  5. Here, we have a report that displays data with different invoice statuses. We need the report to just display "Payment Due" Invoices. We can achieve this using the Filters option. Click Filter and select Invoice Status. Add the filter as shown in the image below and click Add Filter.

This is how the report would look like. The data in the report will be updated when the sync happens (that is, once in 4-5 hours).

Summary Report 

A Summary Report is used to provide a concise and high-level overview of the data. In Summary reports the data are grouped by specific attributes (such as status, type etc.) This type of report is extremely useful when you want to look at data by different dimensions to understand trends, anomalies, and so on.

Here is how a Summary Report would look like.

Summary Reports are created using a primary data source. Any Summary Report will have grouping and aggregation.

You can use the fields of the selected data source or that of its parent to group the data. For example, if you have selected Subscriptions, then you can group the report using the fields from Subscriptions or from Customers.

In case if your selected data source is Invoices, then you can group them using Subscriptions, Invoices or Customers.

You can group the data in the report by columns or rows. It helps in organizing a view for the report.

Another key aspect of Summary Reports is aggregation. Aggregation is a function where the values of multiple rows are grouped together to form a single summary value. You can apply summary functions such as Sum, Average, Count, Count Distinct, Min, and Max to aggregate the data. Aggregation can be done only at the child (data source) level.

Creating a Summary Report 

  1. Click RevenueStory > Report Builder.

  2. Choose Create a Summary Report.

  3. Choose the primary Data Source using which you'd like to create the report. We are going to see how to create a report to view the total number of active, cancelled, paused and trial users in each plan. To do this, select the Subscriptions data source.

  4. Select the Data source and Field for Row and Column grouping. You can select a maximum of 2 rows and 2 columns. Select the subscription status field from the Subscriptions data source for column grouping. And, the current plan field from the subscriptions data source for Row grouping.

  5. Select the fields from the field dropdown and then select how you want to aggregate the data from the selected field. The operations (aggregation) that can be performed on the selected field will be displayed in the aggregation dropdown. Here, we are applying the count operation on the Subscription ID field (from Subscriptions). Click Build Report.

Note
  • Use apply aggregation only on a single field.
  • Grand totals are not available in the downloaded/scheduled report.

This is how the report would look like. The data in the report will be updated when the sync happens every 2-3 hours. However, delays may occur if a high volume of data sync happens.

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