GUIDEreports helps you move from “Something needs my attention” to “Here are the records I need to investigate.”

Reports can include summary cards, charts, tables, filters, and detailed drilldowns. Once you understand how these pieces work together, you can use the same investigation process across nearly every GUIDEreport.

A useful reporting workflow is:

Start broad → narrow the data → identify a signal → drill into the records → take action

Before applying filters or opening a drilldown, decide what you are trying to understand.

For example:

Starting with a question makes it much easier to choose the right report, metrics, and filters.

Instead of asking:

“What does this dashboard tell me?”

Try asking:

“Which projects need my attention this week?”

Then use the report to find the answer.

Filters narrow the data included in a report so you can focus on the customers, projects, tasks, dates, or other criteria that matter to your question.

Instead of reviewing your entire portfolio, you might filter a report to:

The widgets on the report update to reflect the data matching your selected filters while still following each widget's individual calculation rules.

Most GUIDEreports use the same report-level filters:

Date filters include options for common reporting periods as well as custom date ranges.

Filters become especially useful when you combine them.

For example, imagine an onboarding manager preparing for a customer call about delayed work.

They could filter the report to:

Which customer-owned tasks for Acme currently need attention?

Or a delivery leader might combine:

Which enterprise implementations ending this quarter are currently late?

Think of a report filter as changing the population you are asking GUIDEreports to analyze.

For example, imagine Total Active Projects shows 74 projects.

If you filter the report to a particular customer, you are no longer asking:

“How many active projects do we have?”

You are now asking:

“How many active projects match this customer filter?”

The same principle applies when filtering by status, responsibility, tags, custom fields, or dates.

This is especially important when sharing report results with someone else.

Before presenting a number, check the active filters so everyone understands the population that number represents.

Different parts of a GUIDEreport help answer different levels of your question.

A summary card might show:

These numbers are useful signals.

But a number usually tells you that something deserves attention — not necessarily why.

Charts can help you understand where a result is concentrated.

For example, an overdue-work chart might show which projects have the largest number of overdue tasks and how those tasks are distributed by status.

That changes the question from:

“Do we have overdue work?”

to:

“Where is our overdue work concentrated?”

A drilldown lets you investigate the records behind a metric or visualization.

Depending on the report, those records might represent:

Not every GUIDEreports widget is clickable.

To see whether a widget supports a drilldown, hover your cursor over it.

If your cursor changes to a pointer hand, you can select the widget to open its drilldown.

If your cursor does not change to a pointer, that widget does not have an available drilldown.

Suppose Stuck Tasks shows 12.

That number tells you how much blocked work exists based on the widget calculation and your current filters.

Your next question probably isn't:

“Is 12 a big number?”

A more useful question is:

“Which 12 tasks are stuck, who owns them, and which projects are affected?”

Open the drilldown to investigate the individual records contributing to the result.

Depending on the report, drilldown fields can include information such as:

The exact fields depend on the report and the type of data being investigated.

See GUIDEreports drilldown field reference for more information about the fields available across GUIDEreports.

Every column header in a GUIDEreports drilldown table is sortable.

Select a column header to sort the table A → Z or Z → A. Select it again to reverse the order.

Sorting is especially useful when a drilldown contains many records.

For example, you might sort by:

Sorting does not change which records are included in the drilldown. It changes the order in which you review them.

This can make it much easier to find patterns or prioritize the records you want to investigate first.

The following is an illustrative onboarding scenario.

Your weekly delivery review shows an increase in overdue customer tasks.

Instead of immediately contacting every customer, you can use GUIDEreports to narrow the problem.

The Overdue Customer Tasks metric tells you that customer-owned work is past due.

Apply filters for the customers, projects, or other criteria included in your review.

Use the available project-level charts or other visualizations to determine whether the overdue work is spread across many projects or concentrated in a few.

If the widget supports drilling down, hover over it and look for the pointer cursor.

Open the drilldown to identify the individual tasks contributing to the result.

Sort the drilldown by a column that helps with your investigation.

You may discover that:

Now your team's conversation can be specific.

Instead of:

“We have a lot of overdue customer work.”

you might determine:

“Most of our overdue customer work is concentrated in two implementations, so let's review those projects first.”

That is the difference between simply reading a dashboard and using the report to make a decision.

Two widgets on the same report do not necessarily measure the same population.

Each widget has its own calculation and inclusion rules.

For example, one metric might count all projects, while another counts only projects meeting a particular status or timing requirement.

One task widget might include all tasks, while another might only include:

This means the same report filters can apply to multiple widgets while those widgets still return different totals.

That does not mean one of the widgets is incorrect.

They may simply answer different questions.

Use the article for the standard report or the GUIDEreports widget library when you need to understand exactly what a widget includes.

Imagine a report shows:

Total Tasks: 2,450

and

Active Tasks: 620

These are not two competing answers to the same question.

Total Tasks answers a question about overall task volume.

Active Tasks answers a question about the work that currently qualifies as active based on that widget's calculation.

Instead of asking:

“Which number is right?”

ask:

“What question is each metric answering?”

Both numbers can be correct.

You do not need to review every card, chart, and table every time you open a report.

Try this workflow instead.

For example:

Which active projects need attention this week?

Start with the report that most closely matches your question.

For example, Projects Overview can help with portfolio health, while Task Management can help you investigate task-level delivery problems.

Narrow the report to the customers, projects, statuses, responsibilities, dates, or other criteria relevant to your review.

Focus on the metrics and charts related to your question.

You do not need to interpret every widget on the report.

Look for work that appears late, stuck, unusually high, or otherwise worth investigating.

When a widget supports a drilldown, use it to identify the underlying records.

Use the drilldown's sortable column headers to organize the records around your investigation.

Your next action might be to:

GUIDEreports helps you find where to look. Your team can then decide what action makes sense based on the underlying work.

These are suggested reporting practices rather than product requirements.

Avoid opening a report and trying to understand everything at once.

A question such as:

“Which projects are at risk of missing their target date?”

gives the review a clear purpose.

A metric filtered to one customer means something very different from the same metric across your full portfolio.

Always check the report scope before presenting a number as an organization-wide result.

A high number of stuck or overdue tasks tells you something deserves attention.

It does not automatically explain the cause.

Use the available drilldown and underlying project information before deciding why the work is delayed.

Start with the report, narrow it with filters, identify the signal, and then move into the individual records.

This is often much faster than beginning with individual projects or tasks.

Widgets with similar names can still use different inclusion rules.

Check the widget definition when the difference is not obvious.

Instead of asking your team to “go through the dashboard,” start with a question such as:

Which customers need follow-up before the end of the week?

or

Which late projects require intervention?

The report becomes more useful when it supports a specific decision.

Report-level filters narrow the data being analyzed by the report.

Each widget still follows its own calculation, so two widgets can return different totals even when the same filters are applied.

Yes.

Combining filters lets you focus on a more specific group of records.

For example, you could combine Customer, Project Status, Task Responsibility, and a date filter to investigate a specific type of work.

Keep in mind that each additional filter narrows the data included in the report.

You changed the population being analyzed.

For example, Total Active Projects across the full workspace and Total Active Projects after filtering to one customer answer different versions of the same question.

Check the active filters whenever a number looks different from what you expected.

Your combination of filters may be very narrow.

Review your active filters and remove them one at a time to see which condition is limiting the results.

This is especially helpful when you're combining statuses, dates, custom fields, and other criteria.

Widgets can use different calculations and inclusion rules.

One might include all records, while another includes only active work, a particular responsibility, certain statuses, or a specific date period.

Before comparing two metrics, check what question each widget is designed to answer.

Hover your cursor over the widget.

If your cursor changes to a pointer hand, the widget supports a drilldown.

If the pointer does not appear, the widget does not have an available drilldown.

No.

Some widgets can be opened to show underlying records, while others cannot.

Use the cursor behavior to identify which widgets support drilling down.

If the widget supports a drilldown, select it to open the underlying records.

You can then use the drilldown fields and sortable column headers to investigate the individual projects, tasks, users, time entries, CSAT responses, or other records represented by that widget.

Yes.

Every drilldown column header is sortable.

Select a column header to sort A → Z or Z → A, and select it again to reverse the order.

No.

Sorting changes the order of the records in the drilldown. It does not change which records are included in the result.

It depends on what you already know.

If you know the population you want to investigate — for example, one customer — filtering first can make the report easier to review.

If you do not know where the issue is concentrated, start broad. Use the summary metrics and charts to find a signal, then drill into the underlying records.

Start by checking:

A record can exist in GUIDEcx without qualifying for every widget.

Start with the report context before assuming the data is incorrect.

Check:

These checks can often explain why the result differs from what you expected.

If the underlying records still do not appear to match the widget's documented calculation, note the report, widget, active filters, and example records so the behavior can be investigated further.

No.

For example, a high number of active tasks could simply reflect a large active project portfolio.

Metrics are signals. Use related charts, filters, and drilldowns to understand the context before deciding whether action is needed.

A report filter determines which data you are asking the report to analyze.

A widget calculation determines which records from that data qualify for a particular metric.

For example:

Filter: Show me only Enterprise customers.

Widget calculation: Within those customers, count projects that are forecasted late.

Both affect the result, but they do different jobs.

Advanced Time Reporting includes all standard GUIDEreports filters plus Date Worked and Time Entry Member.

These filters are specific to time-entry reporting and let you narrow results based on when work occurred or who logged it.

Users Overview does not have report-level filters.

It reports on workspace-user records rather than using the standard project- and task-based filtering experience.

First, see whether the report's filters can narrow an existing standard report to the information you need.

If it still does not answer your question, you can create a custom GUIDEreport using the available widgets.

See Build a custom GUIDEreport to learn how report building works, and use the GUIDEreports widget library to understand what each available widget measures.

Use these resources depending on what you want to do next: