Building a Basic Aggregate (Count) Report - Step by Step
Within the report builder there are two basic kinds of reports that can be built: detailed & aggregate. In an aggregate report your goal is to count the entries for a particular field within your database. This could range from gender/age to encounter services or abuse types. The important thing to remember about aggregate reports is that your ultimate goal is to produce a count of one field, not detailed information such as including client names or case numbers. If you are tying to create a report that includes multiple fields you will need to create a detailed report.
Tip: Learning how to create and build reports takes time. While this guide can put you in the right direction for building a report, practice makes perfect. If you run into any issues or have questions please reach out to us utilizing our help desk.
Within this article we'll look at step by step how to build an aggregate report and evaluate the results. Please follow along below:
1. First navigate to the report builder within your database (Reporting -> Report Builder).
2. Once in the report builder decide what field you would like to generate an aggregate report for within a certain dataset. Within our screenshots below we're using encounter services as an example, however you can select what ever field you need to generate an aggregate for.
Important: For this report to be an aggregate you need to do two things. 1. Select client account ID from the client demographics dataset and place it below the field you want to count & 2. Within the client account ID option in report fields make your aggregate report selection within the F (Function) button. Displayed below.
When making your aggregate selection you will have several options as displayed below. The two most common selections you will make are either Count or Distinct Count. While these two selections sound very similar they both calculate data in different ways:
- Count: This will count the field you selected including duplication based up the client account ID. Using a count is great for encounter services because we want to include duplication of all services applied, rather than condensing all services into 1 tally.
- Distinct Count: This will count the field you selected excluding duplication based upon the client account ID. This kind of count is great when calculating things like gender or race, as it will condense duplication. Such as if a client has three accounts, we wouldn't want to count the gender of the client three times for our report, we only would want to count it once.
It's also important to note that if you add in more than 1 field to count, your data will be skewed. As aggregate reports are only meant to count 1 field. You should only have: the field you want to count & the client account ID.
3. After making your aggregate selection you can now move down to the filters section. Within the filters section you can set up rules to manipulate the data to your reporting needs. For most aggregate counts you will need to make a secondary date selection. This allows us to look at a slice of data from a certain period of time rather than looking at all existing data within your database.
For our example of encounter services selecting 'Encounter Date' is a great option. Typically selecting a field within the dataset you're trying to create a report for is the best choice. Like if you were pulling a report for abuse types, using the 'Date presented to CAC' date field will help control the data.
Additionally you can setup more rules like any other report to further control the data. For our basic report we'll leave our rules section with only secondary date field. However, if you were running a services report and wanted to see how many services a certain personnel completed, you could add in the 'Performed by' field as a rule and select one personnel.
For more information on the report builder please check out our article on building a detailed report: click here.
4. Once adding in your desired rules you can now run the report! Within the output options make your selections and press the 'View' button.
Tip: If you would like to save this report (so you don't need to recreate it each time you want to run it) you can fill in the 'Report Name' field and press the 'Save to Library' button to save for future use.
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