Sharing a Spark Calendar Using the Daily Visit Report

There may be circumstances where users need to share their entire calendar, providing insight about their event activity to a manager or peer. Sharing a calendar can be done from the Calendar page but is less than ideal because it only provides the names of the events and their completion status. If event names don't reflect the Account or Contact associated to the event, simply looking at the calendar won't be very helpful. To gain insight into events on the calendar, users must mouse-over the event or click on the event to open it. 

The Daily Visit Report (found on the Reporting page) is the best resource for sharing event activities and notes. This article provides an overview of the report and covers some of the best practices based on user role (Account Executive or Manager).

Accessing the Report

As with any other reports, the Daily Visit Report can only be found on the web and is not available on the mobile application. Once logged into the PlayMaker Spark web environment, navigate to the Reporting page by clicking on the Reporting link (above). Scroll down the page to the Events section. Click on the Daily Visit Report link (shown below) to open the report.

The Daily Visit report will open. At the top of the table are the filtering options, which vary depending on role.

Report Options (Account Executive)

For Account Executives, users will only have access to view their own events. While a Select Territory option is available, it's really only useful for representatives that service more than one sales territory within their organization. Leaving this option blank will include all events for the user within all territories that they service. Selecting a territory will only display events within that territory. Similarly, most users won't use the Role filter since they won't have multiple roles available.

The Date Range filter allows users to select the period of time from a large number of options. It's important to note that this report can filter for both past events and future events. To create a filter for a specific period in time that isn't available from the pre-existing options, choose the Within a Range option at the top of the Date Range dropdown to select starting and end dates.

The Account field allows a user to filter the report for a specific account, rather than all of the accounts that they have events scheduled for.

The Sort By filter allows the report to be sorted by event start time, account name, or a few other options. This report is most commonly run using the Start Time option, as it places events in chronological order in either ascending (oldest events first) or descending (newest events first) order.

After filters have been selected, click the Run Report button to see the results. 

Report Options (Manager)

For Managers, users will have access to view the events of any users in their Sales Territory. The Select Territory option allows managers to quickly filter for events from a particular territory. If the manager is a Region Manager, they will have access to the events of all the users in the different branches within their region.

The Date Range filter allows users to select the period of time from a large number of options. It's important to note that this report can filter for both past events and future events. To create a filter for a specific period in time that isn't available from the pre-existing options, choose the Within a Range option at the top of the Date Range dropdown to select starting and end dates.

The Marketer/User filter allows a manager to filter for a specific user's events. The list of users will be limited to users that are in the manager's sales territories.

The Role filter allows a manager to filter for a specific group of users. If Office Managers and Account Executives both make sales calls, a manager may want to filter a report for the managers only by choosing that role.

The Account field allows a user to filter the report for a specific account, rather than all of the accounts that they have events scheduled for. If multiple users service the same account, both of their activities will be listed on the report, provided that both Account Executives report to the same manager.

The Sort By filter allows the report to be sorted by event start time, account name, or a few other options. This report is most commonly run using the Start Time option, as it places events in chronological order in either ascending (oldest events first) or descending (newest events first) order.

After filters have been selected, click the Run Report button to see the results. 

Sharing the Report

Once the report generates the desired results with the selected filters, the next step is to choose how to share the information in the report. At the top of the report are some options:

  • Export CSV - This will create a CSV file of the report that can be emailed and opened in Excel. CSV files allow the user to filter the results using the tools available within Excel.

  • Export PDF - This will create a PDF that can be opened and viewed on nearly any computer. However, these reports can't be filtered, so it's often less desirable than the CSV format.

  • Print - This will allow the user to print a paper copy of the report.

Best Practices & Tips

  • If a Daily Visit Report will be used again in the future, we suggest saving (using the Save As... button) and scheduling the report (using the Schedule button). This allows the report to be revisited easily without having to set filtering options again by creating a link to the filtered report, and scheduling the report can automate an email that sends the report automatically to user-defined email addresses at a desired frequency. To learn more about saving and scheduling reports, please read this article.

  • The Daily Visit Report can be used to view or print out a list of events to complete each day, or to review events to make sure that all events are completed with notes at the end of each day. The same could be done for a weekly report, to see the upcoming events for the week, and to review events at the end of each week.

  • Scheduling a report can send reports to non-PlayMaker contacts, allowing users to share reports with members of their organization that do not have access to PlayMaker.

  • When scheduling or exporting a Daily Visit Report for a sales territory with multiple users, it is suggested to use the CSV file format so that the results can be easily filtered to find the information that is most important to the viewer.