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Building Custom Reports

There are two ways to build a custom report:

First, churches can author their own report or commission Professional Services to create one. This adds a church-customized report to the hundreds of reports already in MinistryPlatform. To author your own reports, we recommended you have a basic understanding of the following:
  • T-SQL Programming
  • Creating Stored Procedures
  • Report design using the MS Visual Studio or MS Report Builder
  • SQL Server Reporting Services administration
  • MinistryPlatform administration

Second, use the Views/Advanced Search feature of MinistryPlatform to define the columns and filter criteria for the records you want returned. This feature saves the criteria as a Page View that is available to you and (if needed) a User Group, and you can use it to sort, select, email, run reports, text, and so on. Often, building page views with the Advanced Search feature meets a church's reporting needs. They may not need customized reports, particularly if the use tools within the system well. Here are tips to use the system well:

  • Data awareness is powerful, as it's important to know what page to start from when using Advanced Search in MinistryPlatform. For example, for the question "how many people got baptized last month?", you can build a page view in People Lists > Milestones Assigned because that page stores baptism information.
  • Learn tips and tricks from the Help Center, such as how to create a view and examples of views.
  • Learn about other tools in the system, such as Transfer Selection and Trim Selection, as these can help you polish, improve, and distribute your reporting results.

Best Practice

We always recommend you create reports and work on development in a sandbox environment. Once you're ready to deploy your modifications, always make a back-up of the existing system before you deploy the new modifications.