YSR Custom Reports

Overview - YSR:

YSR stands for Yardi Spreadsheet Reporting, Yardi’s flexible and customizable reporting technology. You can use this feature and create customised reports specific to your business needs – either from custom SQL to retrieve the required data or linking in with existing analytics data.

It’s important to research and analyse what your custom report requirements are. There might be an existing report (or more) in Yardi that meets all or most of your needs, therefore a custom report would not be required. Things to consider:

• Take an idea or concept of existing reports in Yardi, that would benefit from a change/update to the report options and the way the report displays to better suit your needs.
• Identifying gaps in your processing that would be enhanced by the ability to view or review data on a custom report.
• Are there any time heavy processes currently being undertaken that a custom report could help with – eliminating manual downloading to Excel, formatting, merging, etc.
• If using or implementing new modules, would a relevant custom report enhance the use and experience.

If you want to proceed with a YSR solution, another exercise to undertake is to make a spec/mock up report. This exercise will help the business iron out all their requirements and scenarios as much as possible. At a minimum include:

• The report filters you want users to be able to enter, including which would be mandatory (if any)
• A sample/mock up of the report output you’re expecting including formatting
• Complete mapping of all values in the report and where you expect it to pull from, including screenshots from Voyager screens and/or analytics

As powerful and flexible as YSR reports are, the limitations you also need to consider are:

• Do you have resources in house with necessary SQL skills and YSR experience?
• If there are no resources in house, is the business willing to spend both the time and $ to outsource (either to Yardi directly or 3rd party consultant)?

The primary templates used with YSR are either Word or Excel – would these file types meet your requirements?

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Available Features:

Let’s dig in a bit deeper with some handy features that you could utilise.

Filters‍

Part of setting up your custom report is setting report filters to use at run time. Within the report setup you can utilise existing lookups in Yardi, or even a custom lookup list based on a SQL query. Other filter types include: dates, post month, checkbox, manual list, text, number, integer and time.

Report output and template files

Within your report setup you can merge multiple reports into one report packet, and you can also control the report iteration (consolidate by property, tenant, owner, etc.)

As mentioned previously, Word or Excel files are the templates for your custom reports, so the features that are available in Word and Excel will be available in your report template and on the report output.

Publish your final report to screen, Excel/Word or PDF.

Email and attach options

At the report setup level you can establish email and attachment options relating to our custom report. Under the Attachment & Email tab of the YSR Report Setup screen you can set default options for Attach and Email (if any), and then setup with Attachment & Email section to indicate for attachments what Attachment Type to use, and for emails which email template to use, and who the report should send to, as well as any additional recipients.

If configured, the Attach and Email options will be available to you on the report run screen. NOTE: you cannot email without the Attach selected.

Hyperlinks

This can be a nifty feature for some reports if you want to be able to drill into certain data fields in your report output. For example, you can setup your template so that the code of a property, will be a hyperlink and drill through to the relevant property record.

The only prerequisite to keep in mind for this to work properly, is the report is run to screen and then the hyperlink selected.

Multiple sections

If your YSR report is going to be a letter, with a Heading and then details, or an Excel report with multiple tabs with various data, it might be worthwhile writing your custom SQL script for your report in different sections. You can enter the details of each section in the report setup so it can link correctly with the SELECT name matching the title in your script template file. Prefixes of your Smart Markers in your Excel templates will just need to match the Section Code in your section configuration.

Menu shortcuts

Once your report is complete it is available under the YSR Reports > Generate Reports menu by default.

Consider creating a specific menu for the report directly, which you can roll out to the one or multiple Roles that would require the report. When setting up the menu the link you need is:

"../Pages/CustomCorrespGenerate.aspx?reportcode=XXX"

(replacing XXX with the code from the YSR Report Setup screen of your new report)

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Are you ready to commit to enhancing your business with custom solutions?