Report Grouping

Grouping lets you collapse many rows of detail into a smaller summary table. Use it when you want to answer questions like "how many hours did each staff member work last month?" or "how many shifts ran at each site this week?" — instead of seeing every individual shift.

This article walks through how grouping works, the controls you'll see in the Reports page, and a few common recipes.

Group a report when you want totals or counts per category, rather than a row-by-row breakdown.

If you just want the underlying detail (every shift listed individually), don't group — leave Group By empty and you'll get one row per record.

That's it. The results table at the bottom will collapse rows that share the same combination of grouped values into a single row.

When you run a grouped report, a strip appears above the results table:

Grouped by [Date ✕] [Staff ✕] 12 groups from 84 source rows · 7.0× aggregation Clear grouping

This combines rows that have the same "Date" and "Staff" into a single row. "Duration (Hours)" will be totalled for each group.

Here's what each part means:

When grouping is active, an extra column called Rows appears at the end of the table. It tells you how many original records were collapsed into each row.

For example, if a row reads:

That means Adamus Prime worked 3 separate shifts on 15 April 2026, and the total of those three shifts was 17.5 hours.

You can sort by the Rows column to see your largest groups first.

When you group, every numeric column you've selected that isn't in the Group By list gets summed automatically. For example:

Non-numeric columns (text fields like Status, Notes, Site Name, etc.) must either be in the Group By list or be removed from the Columns selection — there's no sensible way to "sum" text. If you select a non-numeric column without grouping it, the report builder will warn you on the Options step and the Run Report button will be disabled until you fix it.

The auto-fix buttons next to each warning will either Add to Group By (so it becomes part of the grouping key) or Remove column (so it disappears from the report) in one click.

Common groupings that produce useful reports:

Result: one row per staff member with their total hours for April, biggest at the top.

Result: one row per Date/Site combination with summed hours. Easy to spot a quiet day or a busy weekend.

Result: one row per branch showing how many staff have certificates expiring within 30 days (the Rows column tells you the count).

Result: one row per participant with their billable units and total cost for the period.

If your grouped report has nearly as many rows as your unfiltered data, your grouping is probably too granular.

The most common cause is including time-based columns like Start Time or End Time in Group By. Because every shift has a slightly different start and end time, two rows almost never share an exact combination — so almost every shift becomes its own group, and the table doesn't shrink.

The grouping bar will warn you when this happens:

⚠ Each group is averaging 1.3× source rows — grouping is barely reducing the table. Try removing "Start Time" or "End Time" from Group By.

Click the suggested Remove "Start Time" / Remove "End Time" links and the report will re-run with much more meaningful aggregation.

A good rule of thumb: group on coarse columns (Date, Staff, Site, Role, Branch, Participant) and avoid grouping on fine-grained ones (exact times, IDs, durations). If you want to see results bucketed by week or month rather than by exact date, that's coming in a future update — for now, group by Date and use a filter to narrow the range.

Search is disabled when grouping is active. Search filters individual records before they're grouped, which would silently drop matched records into seemingly unrelated groups — confusing more often than it helps.

If you switch from an ungrouped to a grouped report and you had a search query active, you'll see a notice that the search was cleared. To search within grouped results, clear the grouping first.

CSV and PDF exports include exactly what you see on screen — including the Rows column and the totals for each group. The header row of the CSV will read Date, Staff, Duration (Hours), Rows and the row totals will be the sums you see in the table.

If you want the underlying detail rows in your export, clear grouping before exporting. With no Group By, every record is exported individually.

Pagination works on groups, not source rows. If your report shows "101 groups · 1/5", that means 101 unique groupings split across 5 pages of 25 each. Sort and pagination apply to the grouped output.

You can only sort by columns that are either:

Trying to sort by an ungrouped, non-numeric column (e.g. Notes when you've grouped by Staff) will be blocked with a clear message. To enable that sort, either add the column to Group By, remove it from your selection, or pick a different sort column.

When you group by Date on a column that's actually a date-and-time (like a shift's Start Time), the date is calculated using your computer's timezone. So a Sydney user grouping by date will see a shift that started at 11:30 PM AEST on 14 April under "14 Apr", while the same shift might appear under "13 Apr" in UTC.

This matches what you see in the table itself — the Date and Start Time columns are always shown in your local timezone, and grouping bins them the same way.

If you have a reporting question this article didn't answer, or you'd like to see a new grouping recipe added, contact support.

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