Report Types

When creating a new report, you are given the option to select from six report types which are explained below. The resulting report may be exactly what you need...but if it isn’t, the flexibility of White Cup BI allows you to fully modify any report. This means that any report can be used as a starting point to meet your more complex reporting needs. You can add, remove, and re-order the columns, modify the drill-down path, apply sorting and/or filtering, and more; all without the need to learn a complex query language.

Custom

A custom report can be configured in almost any way you’d like, within the constraints of the hypercube’s configuration You can specify the initial drill-down path as well as the exact columns you want to include in your report.

Trending

A Trending report provides a quick comparison of a specified metric over two or more time periods.

This is an example of a simple trending report like the one we made in the exercise above. It shows the comparison of total sales broken down by warehouse between year September, October and November as a dollar amount and a trend percentage. The originally selected columns are included for reference, and no filters have been applied.

If more than two time periods are selected, there will be one difference and one trend column generated for each pair of selected time periods.

Trending Upward Overall

The Trending Upward Overall report type allows you to quickly retrieve a list of related identifier values which have shown an increase in a defined metric over two selected time periods.

This example shows a Trending Upward Overall report by warehouse comparing sales amounts from year 2022 to year 2024. It includes the difference and trend between the sales values for year 2022 and 2024, as well as the base Sales for 2022, 2023, and Sales for 2024 columns for reference purposes. Additionally, a filter is applied to show only those rows which have had an increase in sales between 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Compare this example with the report from the Trending example above.  You will notice that the sales for the Warehouse 15 were down in 2024 when compared to the sales for 2022. For this reason, Warehouse 15 does not appear in this report.

If more than two time periods are selected, the difference and trend values will be calculated based on the oldest and newest time periods only.

Trending Upward Consistently

The Trending Upward Consistently report type provides the ability to create a report which includes the identifier rows that have shown a consistent increase for a defined metric over two or more selected time periods. Any identifier row that shows a decrease between any of the selected time periods is filtered out of the final display.

The example below shows a Trending Upward Consistently report by warehouse comparing sales amounts from years 2022, 2023, and 2024. It includes the difference and trend between the sales values for 2022 and 2024, as well as the base Sales for 2024, Sales for 2023, and Sales for 2022 columns for reference purposes. Additionally, a filter is applied to show only those rows which have had an increase in sales between 2022 and 2023 and then again between 2023 and 2024.

If you compare this example with the report from the Sales History by Warehouse example (under the Custom report type), you will notice that while the sales for some warehouses were up between years 2022 and 2023, they were down between years 2023 and 2024. For this reason, some warehouses do not appear in this report.

If only two time periods are selected, the resulting report is no different than if the Trending Upward Overall report type had been created with the same time periods. If more than two time periods are selected, the difference and trend values displayed in the report will be calculated from the oldest time period and the newest time period, but the filter will take each time period combination into account from oldest to newest as described above.

Trending Downward Overall

The Trending Downward Overall report type allows you to quickly retrieve a list of related identifier values which have shown a decrease in a defined metric over two selected time periods.

This example shows a Trending Downward Overall report by warehouse comparing sales amounts from year 2022 and year 2024. It includes the difference and trend between the sales values for year 2022 and 2024, as well as the base Sales for 2024 and 2022 columns for reference purposes. Additionally, a filter is applied to show only those rows which have had a decrease in sales between 2022 and 2024.

If you compare this example with the report from the Trending example above, you will notice that the sales for Warehouse 8 is the only warehouse that showed a decrease in sales between 2022 and 2024. For this reason, all warehouses except Warehouse 8 have been automatically removed from this report.

If more than two time periods are selected, the difference and trend values will be calculated based on the oldest and newest time periods only. For example, if we had included year 2023 in the above report, the columns in the resulting report would have been: Difference between 2023 and 2024, Trend between 2023 and 2004, Sales for 2024, Sales for 2023, and Sales for 2022. The year 2023 column would appear in the final report for reference purposes, but the 2023 values would have had no effect on the values in the difference and trend columns; therefore, the addition of this time period would not change the filtering.

Trending Downward Consistently

The Trending Downward Consistently report type provides the ability to create a report which includes the identifier rows that have shown a consistent decrease for a defined metric over two or more selected time periods. Any identifier row that shows an increase between any of the selected time periods is filtered out of the final display.

This example shows a Trending Downward Consistently report by warehouse comparing sales amounts from years 2022, 2023, and 2024. It includes the difference and trend between the sales values for 2022 and 2024, as well as the base Sales for 2024, Sales for 2003, and Sales for 2002 columns for reference purposes. Additionally, a filter is applied to show only those rows which have had a decrease in sales between 2022 and 2023 and then again between 2023 and 2024.

As you can see in the example above, all four warehouses have been filtered out of the final report. Other Warehouses do not appear because the sales for those warehouses showed an increase between 2022 and 2023 and then again between 2023 and 2024. Warehouse 15 showed a decrease in sales between 2023 and 2024, but an increase between 2022 and 2023. In order to be included on this report, a single warehouse would have needed to show a decrease in sales between 2022 and 2023 and then again between 2023 and 2024.

If only two time periods are selected, the resulting report is no different than if the Trending Downward Overall report type had been created with the same time periods. If more than two time periods are selected, the difference and trend values displayed in the report will be calculated from the oldest time period and the newest time period, but the filter will take each time period combination into account from oldest to newest as described above.