DIY Recipe 7: Number of Actions by Action Type

Purpose

This is a fairly simple report which shows the number of actions, by action type, across service types (you could also use funding category, problem type, assigned to, here, whichever is relevant for your reporting needs).

This report is distinguished from DIY recipe 6: Service Actions Report because that report is about drilling down to client, service, action details, whereas this report is just about de-identified action count data.

This report was requested because sometimes you cannot see the true weight of a service without seeing the number of actions attached to it – an ongoing non legal support service may be 1 service in other reports but it could contain a great number of actions – some centres report upwards of 50 actions for some services. This could be show across service types, as in the example here, or for something else like funding category or problem type, or on an individual service basis (but then you are moving more towards the alternate recipe mentioned above).

It is important to break down the actions by action type in order to filter out some actions such as simple correspondence actions e.g. phone call notes, to actions like court attendances and mediations, etc. It is up to centres to determine how they use this information.

Step-by-step guide

1. Select DIY Service Actions template report
2. Save-as and name the report something appropriate
3. Open the field list (either right click near the top or use the column chooser)
4. FInd ‘number of actions’ field and carefully drag this to the ‘Drop data items here’ section (not the row section)
5. Find the ‘action type’ field and drag this to the ‘Drop column fields here’ section over on the right.
6. Find the ‘service type’ field drag this to the ‘Drop row fields here’ section. You may want to interchange this with another field like funding category, problem type, assigned to, etc depending on your needs.
7. Set the date range to something small e.g. one month to start with
8. Set the additional reporting period to ‘open date’ if you want to report on all services opened with the period, or ‘close date’/ completed services if you only want to report on discrete services and closed representation services within the period.
9. Set funding categories
10. Tick ‘show custom fields’ unless you are sure you do not need it. You may have custom action types which you want to report on, e.g. ‘police interview’ etc.
11. Click load report
12. Use the filter button next to ‘service type’ field to filter the results down to just the services you need (if you are not using service type field per step 6, then you will need to add it to the report now, to either row fields or filter fields then apply the filter if you wish to use it)
13. Expand the date range to something larger if you need to
14. Load the report.

Example screenshot

The example screenshot below is not a report containing a lot of data, but we can see this is a quick way to see the number of a particular action type provided in in a certain service type. If funding category is added alongside or instead of service type, you get a breakdown of actions by funding category, etc etc.