When Record File Approval Workflows are enabled for a Multiple Upload field, the below associated reporting capabilities are available to help you track both in-progress File Approvals, as well as retrospective reporting when looking back on work done for a specific project or campaign.
Click on an option below to jump to that section:
Tracking in-progress Approvals:
- File Approval Progress Tracking in Database
- Filter Records by File Approval Status
- Show 'Time to Complete' for Files in Record
- Dashboards - Time to Complete
- Dashboards - Markup Comments Revisions
- Reporting on for Record Files
- Reporting on Revisions made for Record Files
- Data Conditions (Reporting Filters)
Tracking in-progress Approvals
File Approval Progress Tracking in Databases
This feature allows you to track the progress of File Approval requests at a Database Record Home level - giving an overview of their progress across all displaying records.
Configure Feature Field
When a multiple upload field exists in a Database and has a workflow enabled, that upload field name will appear as for selection in the Featured Field column in Database Settings.
There will also be an option for ‘All Multi Upload Fields’ which will apply the progress tracking to all multiple upload fields within the record:
Once either a specific multi upload field, or ‘All’ is selected as Featured Field then the below options appear in the Featured Field Completion Value field:
- Approved / Cancelled / Declined / Pending - will track how many files have this status out of the total number of files that have been sent for approval (not including files that have no request).
- Completed - will track all Approved, Cancelled and Declined statuses, which will also help give an indication of how many are still in pending.
NOTE: When enabled, this feature will display the progress of Approvals within the records to all users who have relevant permission to see them in this location.
Display in Database Views
Once configured, the Progress Tracker icon will appear in the Featured Field Column in List View:
N/A will display in grey icon if no relevant files (within the selected field, or any multi upload field if ‘All’ was selected) have had approval requests made.
Otherwise ‘X of Y Status’ will display where:
- X = number of files that meet the selected Status
- Y = total number of relevant files with approval requests
- Status = the status that was selected in the Settings page, such as ‘Approved’, ‘Pending’, ‘Completed’ etc
Examples of this 'X of Y' status may be:
- 1 of 5 files are Approved
- 2 of 20 files are Declined
- None of 10 files are Cancelled
- 7 of 7 files are Pending
When hovering over the icon, a help tooltip will provide additional information along these lines. When ‘Completed’ is selected a breakdown will be provided listing multiple status 'X of Y' so users can see exactly how many files have been Approved, Declined, Cancelled, and are still in Pending status.
The icon color indicates what % of files have met selected status:
- 0-50% of files sent for approval that match the selected status will display as a red icon.
- 50-99% is orange.
- 100% is green.
The icon will also appear in the other record home views:
- Card View
- Calendar View
- Kanban View
Filter Records by File Approval Status
When Filtering your records you can also opt to see records that contain Record File Approvals under a specific status or statuses.
A Multiple Upload Field will only show in Filter side panel when a File Approval Workflow has been enabled for that field. From this a status or multiple statuses can be selected:
- Approved
- Cancelled
- Completed (this encompasses all Approved, Cancelled and/or Declined statuses)
- Declined
- Pending
Records will then filter to match selection, i.e:
- If only ‘Pending’ is selected, you will only see records that contain a Pending file or files (noting this same record may also contain files with non-selected statuses)
- If both 'Approved' and 'Declined' are selected, you will records that contain at least one file with either of these statuses (noting the same records may also contain files with different statuses also)
- If ‘Completed’ is selected, is selected you will see records which contain files that are either ‘Approved’, ‘Declined’ or 'Cancelled’ (noting the same records may also still contain other Pending files)
Show 'Time to Complete' for Files in Record
This feature allows users who have permission to see the file requests in the record to also see how long the request took to be completed. This helps provide time tracking at the record level for these files requests.
Configure 'Time to Complete':
To configure this feature, in your Form Builder edit a Multiple Upload Field that has Workflows enabled.
A ‘Display Time to Complete’ checkbox will display. Once selected a toggle option will appear called Include Weekends, which will be enabled by default:
If disabled, the time to complete calculation will exclude weekends - it will act as, for example, if only one hour has passed between 11:30pm Friday and 12:30am Monday. The start and end of the weekend will be defined by the the timezone of the user who made the request.
NOTE: In either Include or Exclude scenarios, public holidays are not taken into consideration and therefore will be counted as a normal day.
Display in Record:
When enabled, when a file request is completed text will appear next to the status of the files in the file list such as:
- Time taken to Approve: 19 Days, 1 Hour
- Time taken to Decline: 19 Days, 2 Hours
- Time taken to Cancel: 0 Hours
Pending requests do not show any text as they are not completed.
'0 Hours' reflects that the request was completed (inc Cancelled scenarios) in under an hour.
Dashboards - Time to Complete
In Dashboards for Item List Widgets when selected tool is Workflows, you can configure the Feature Column or Secondary Fields to include either of the same ‘Time to Complete’ options as in the record:
- Time to Complete
This would display the total days and hours it took to complete the request.
'Complete' can encompass any of 'Approved', 'Declined' or 'Cancelled' status. - Time to Complete (Excluding Weekends)
This would exclude weekends from the calculation, with when the weekend begins and end being defined by the timezone of the user who made the request.
Note that for Feature Field that neither of these options are supported in the subsequent Default Sort Order field (so results cannot be sorted based on the time to complete values).
When configured, the value will match the same as displayed in the record (if this feature is also enabled there).
The below example shows a secondary field set to Exclude weekends and the Feature column set to the include weekends option:
Pending requests will show as N/A for either Feature or secondary fields.
Note that Cancelled requests do not currently display in widget list results.
Dashboards - Markup Comments Revisions
You can also keep track of how many new Revisions have been made as part of a File Approval request.
In Dashboards for Item List Widgets when selected tool is Workflows, the below options exist to display and allow filtering results by the number of Markup Comment Revisions made via the Record File Approval request:
Markup Comments Revisions:
- This is available as both a Feature field or secondary field display to show number of new revisions made as part of this request only (ie, does not include the original file upload in the count, or any revisions made in General Markup Comments for the same file).
- This field is also available as a Filtering condition to allow you to filter down results to only show File Approval requests where more than / less than an entered number of revisions has occurred (Note less than filter will also include "N/A" results, where no new revisions have been made or if General Markup Comments was not enabled for that upload field.)
Record File Reporting
Reporting on for Record Files
This section outlines many reporting touch-points that may also be useful for files that are not involved in an Approval process, with some options however only applicable to files that are undergoing an Approval:
When a specific Database is selected in Stats Reporting and a Multiple Upload field is selected as a Data Column, the below options are available in the subsequent dropdown:
- File Count displays a tally of the number of current files that exist in the selected field.
- File Name(s) displays each file name on a separate line in the results*
- Type will show if the asset in the Multiple Upload Field is a 'File' or a 'Web Url'
- File URL will display the full web address of any URL added to the field
- Creator Name will return the name of the user who added the file
- Creator Email will return the email Address of the user who added the file
- Created Time will return the saved time that the original file was uploaded
- Approval Status will return the current File Approval status, if one exists, to save you having to create a separate workflow report to track these files' workflow progress
- General Markup Comments Revisions - see section below
- File Approval Revisions - see section below
- Total Revisions - see section below
- Published Location (UUID) will display the UUID that a Publish to Folder file was originally published into
- Published Location (Name) will display the folder name that a Publish to Folder file was originally published into
When run, a report may look similar to the below example, which displays all the files uploaded to a field within a single record and their various workflow statuses and other key information.
*It is important to note that multiple upload fields within duplicable sections are excluded from the above full list of reporting options. For these fields only the below options are available:
- File Count
- File Name(s) - which will display all files names in a single string of comma separated text such as: "filenameone.jpeg, filename2.doc, ThirdFile.bmp"
Reporting on Revisions made for Record Files
Expanding on the above; when a specific Database is selected in Stats Reporting and a Multiple Upload field is selected as a Data Column, the below Revision reporting options are also available in the subsequent dropdown:
General Markup Comments Revisions
This will display the number (count) of Revisions made for a file in General Markup Comments.
If General Markup Comments has not been enabled for the selected multiple upload field, or no revisions have been made in this location for a file, it will display as "N/A".
When a revision has been made in General Markup Comments it will display as a numeric value such as "1".
You can read more on enabling General Markup Comments for Record Files here.
File Approval Revisions
This will display the number (count) of Revisions made for a file when it is under Approval.
If a File Approvals Workflow have not been enabled for the selected multiple upload field, or no revisions have been made in this location for a file, it will display as "N/A".
When a revision has been made via the Approval Request it will display as a numeric value such as "1".
You can read more on Record File Approvals here.
Total Revisions
This will be a calculation of the above two fields AND will also include the original file that was uploaded, which is considered ‘Revision 1’ by default:
Example 1: If a file was uploaded and no new revisions have been added in either General Markup Comments or File Approval Request, then Total Revisions = 1 (the original uploaded file)
Example 2: If a file was uploaded and 1 new revision have been made in General Markup Comments and 1 also in the File Approval Request for the same file, then the Total Revisions = 3 (1 made in General Markup Comments + 1 File Approval Revision + originally uploaded file).
The minimum count for this data column when a file exists will therefore always be '1'.
Data Conditions (Reporting Filters)
The below options are also available as Data Conditions to help filter out results based on attributes of files in the selected Multiple Upload field.
- File Name(s) to only show results including matching/partial match of names
- Type to only show results that include either a 'File' or a 'Web URL'
- File URL to only show results that include a match to a full or partial web address entered here
- Creator Name to only show results including files added by specific user(s)
- Creator Email as above, but more specific to a user’s unique email
- Created Time to filter to only include results with files added on a specific day or during a time frame (such as after 1 Jan 2022)
- Approval Status to only include results with files matching specific approval status such as wanting to see all records with ‘Pending’ files
- General Markup Comments Revisions, File Approval Revisions, & Total Revisions to filter results based on number of revisions for files
- Published Location (UUID) for specific matches where files have been published into a folder/s
- Published Location (Name) as above, but by folder name, knowing there may be multiple folders with similar names on the platform that may match
In the below example of using a number of Revisions a filtering option, the condition value needs to be a numerical character to match the display value, such as '5':
NOTE: When filtering by any Record File condition value, matches will be made based on any one file within the selected field for a record matching the condition. Other files that exist in the same record will also be displayed in the returned results as long as one of the files in that record is a match.
For example; filtering to see only matching ‘Pending’ files will display all files within a record where only one file is actually Pending and the rest may be are Approved or Declined. (Records with no Pending files however would be excluded in this scenario.)
File Approval Reporting
Request & Response Reporting for File Approvals
In the Stats Reporting module, for Workflow Request and Response Reporting that pertains to Record File Approval requests, the below options are specifically available for this workflow type to report on, with the aim of saving multiple reports having to be run to bridge information relating to the request and the source record the file resides in:
- Record UUID - This will return the UUID of the record the file exists in. UUIDs cannot be changed so this is an immutable source that relates the file to the record.
- Record Title - This will return the current record title, noting that this can be changed if the record is updated.
- Record Sequence ID - This will only display results where it has been enabled for that database
- Field Title - will display the name of the multiple upload field, helpful if more than one exists within a database.
- Database Name - The name of the database that the record (and hence file) resides in.
- Markup Comments Revisions - This will display the number of new revisions made as part of this request only and does not include the original file upload in the count, or revisions made in General Markup Comments.
- This field is also available as a Data condition to allow you to filter down results to only show File Approval requests where more than / less than an entered number of revisions has occurred
'Time to Complete' in Reporting
For all Workflow Requests - including File Approvals - a new ‘Time to Complete (Hours)’ data column is available for both Workflow Requests and Response stat reports.
Unlike the 'Time to Complete' features in the record and dashboard locations, here there is no option to exclude weekends.
Instead, we display the time to complete value only as the total hours numerical figure (so ‘25’ and not ‘1 Day, 1 Hour’). This is so it is easier to do further calculations when the data is exported into a spreadsheet (such as to determine average time to complete across multiple requests tied to a single campaign, etc).
Pending requests will be displayed as “N/A”. These will update once completed.
These can also be used as Data Conditions to filter results based on how long requests took to complete; if for example you have a set KPI or goal timeframe to close off requests you can filter to see which requests have taken longer than that time.
Filtering 'less than' conditions (such as less than 1) will also automatically filter out Pending results that are not completed.
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Please note that some of the terminology referenced above may appear differently in your platform as there are customisable terms.You can view related terminology here.
If you have any further questions about Record File and File Approval Reporting, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
RELATED:
Upload Field - Single and Multiple Upload Options
Database Upload Fields - General Markup Comments
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