Major Platform Update – Reports

We are thrilled to announce that reports in the Open Food Network are about to undergo the first part of a massive overhaul. This is the beginning of a suite of changes that will make life easier for thousands of producers using our platform around the world.

The initial improvements include:

• The ability to download reports in PDF, CSV, Excel and OpenOffice formats.
• Easy printing options for all reports.
• The ability to hide columns on reports before viewing or downloading them.
• The ability to add (and remove) header and summary rows.
• The ability to view packing reports by-product (previously only. customer and supplier options were present).

You can read more about the changes here.

A huge thank you to Sebastian Castro, a well-known developer in the French Open Source community for kicking off this big project for the Open Food Network.

This is the first part of an overhaul of our reporting functionality. Future changes are likely to include further UI/ UX refinements, the ability to save rendering options for reports and merging reports that contain very similar data.

What you need to be aware of:

Please note that this first portion of development should not change any field names or the order in which fields are displayed in a way that would impact on your workflows or integrations, however there is a small chance that something may be affected.

Changes that you should be aware of include:

• Spreadsheets have been made human-readable, which means that any instance of ‘ false’ will be changed to ‘No’. CSV exports will still have the value of ‘false’.
• In the ‘Order Cycle Management Report’, the “code” heading has been renamed “customer code”.
• ‘Orders Cycle Supplier Totals’ now has total rows, but this can be unselected when choosing to generate this report.
• The last two columns of the ‘Order Cycle Supplier Totals’ report have been removed as they contained no data.
• Download file names have changed.
• Column “to hub” in ‘Order Cycle Suppliers Totals’ by Distributors has been renamed “hub”.
• Packing reports now have price and phone number fields added, however, these are hidden by default.
• The Xero reports code was selecting default data. This data is now shown on the UI and the user can change what is included.

These changes will be released on the 24th of May, and should not break anything that is connected to the CSV format of the reports.

Future changes to reports:

This is the first part of a major overhaul of our reporting functionality. We are aware that many of the enterprises using the Open Food Network have developed custom integrations into our platform and have delayed any changes that are likely to cause issues to these integrations such as:

• Consistent column names for the same data in multiple reports
• Removal of obsolete fields

If you have custom processes set up that rely on either:

• Column names 
• The fields in reports to be in their exact order

Please notify our customer support team so that we can provide you with additional lead time as to when these projects will be rolled out.

If you have any questions or concerns about the above, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at hello@openfoodnetwork.org.au.

Would you like help with building custom integrations?

In addition to this, if you find yourself or your team performing a huge amount of administrative work, our team can help by building custom integrations and reports for you.

Common use cases include:

• Updating email marketing or SMS platforms (e.g. Mailchimp) with customer details
• Updating accounting platforms (e.g. Xero) with account, contact and payment information
• Integrating and managing Open Food Network data with other data sources through Google Sheets or Airtable.

Have you got something in mind? Fill in the below form to see if it’s possible.