Generating and saving reports

Reports are generated from a catalogue of defined report types, scoped to the client and period you choose. Reports you produce repeatedly can be saved so the parameters do not have to be reassembled each time.

The catalogue spans two broad audiences and they want genuinely different things. Technical reports answer operational questions — patch position, endpoint health, inventory, compliance findings. Executive and board reports answer commercial and risk questions — estate position, risk exposure, delivered value, client health.

Sending the wrong one is the most common reporting mistake and it is worse than sending nothing. A technical report to an executive audience reads as noise and quietly trains that audience to stop opening your reports. An executive report to a technical audience reads as evasion. Neither recovers easily.

Save the reports you actually reuse, and only those. A saved-report list that has accumulated forty variants nobody can distinguish is worse than an empty one, because now every report run starts with an archaeology problem. Prune it when it stops being obvious what each entry is for.

Scope reports tightly to the client and period being discussed. Reports that quietly widen their scope to include everything are hard to read and easy to misinterpret, and a figure that includes machines outside the conversation will eventually be quoted back to you as though it did not.

Reports draw on data the platform holds, so their quality is bounded by the quality of that data. A compliance report against a client whose contract records are out of date will be internally consistent and externally wrong.