When you build a report that doesn't return proper results, it's very likely that the issue is with the data in your records or the conditions set in your filters. Check for this common issue by working through your filters, step by step.
Here are a few common hurdles you might encounter:
Incomplete data entry
When someone is entering records in a CRM, it's always possible they'll miss a field or enter something incorrectly. We can't help interruptions or distractions 100% of the time, but having a good process in place will help you and your staff enter things correctly and catch errors.
Reports will be accurate only if the fields they search through are complete and updated. For example, a sales report might be based on each opportunity's Forecast Close Date field; a task report might look for completed tasks or tasks in progress, which are recorded in the Status field. Having good staff training or a system in place will help keep these important fields—and your reports—up to date.
You can also create exception reports to check for missing data. With an "Is Empty" filter, you can find records that are missing data to help you catch and fix those issues. And if you have a paid subscription, you can even set up a scheduled report to check for problems on a regular basis.
Conflicting "AND" filters
One thing that will create a report that returns no data is having two AND conditions for a single-value field. Let's say you're building a report on tasks, and you want to see all of the tasks with a status of In Progress or Not Started. You might be tempted to add two filters with an AND operator between them, but this will be a problem. Why?
Insightly looks at each task to find matches for the filters that you create. With the filter below, Insightly looks for a task that has a status of In Progress "and" a status of Not Started. Since each task can only have one status, no task will ever match this criteria. This report will always come up empty.
But if you change the AND to an OR, Insightly will find tasks with a status of Not Started "or" with a status of In Progress. Remember that the AND operator restricts the number of results and the OR operator expands the number of results.
Date filter issues
Another thing that might be confusing is working with dates. Insightly's date filters can be set up with static dates or relative dates. A static date is a single date entered directly into the field, like 10/31/2015. A relative date is a date reference like Today, Next Week, or Last Quarter.
If today is 09/30/2015 and you'd like a report to monitor all leads created after today, you would want to enter the static date. Then, every time you run the report in the future, you'll see the new leads that have been added since that date.
If you entered "Today" instead, there would never be any results, because that selection will always look at the current date. Insightly reporting is good, but cannot tell the future.
When troubleshooting reports, examine each of your parameters, carefully. When you follow the logic in your filters one step at a time—even when using advanced filter logic—you'll figure out how to get the results you need.