09 — Guides
Editing a report
This is where you will spend your time. Not building reports — that is done for you — but adding the writing, checking the result and sending it. Editing here means filling a finished report with judgement, and the tools are shaped around that rather than around page layout.
What you are actually editing
Open a report and most of what you see is already correct. The figures came from your data and cannot be typed over — that is the point of them. What is editable is the writing and imagery around them, and it falls into a few kinds.
- Portfolio commentary (changes by portfolio and by period) — The manager’s view on one strategy this period. Written per portfolio, per period, and it appears wherever that portfolio’s reports call for it.
- Market commentary (changes by period only) — The house view on the period. Written once and carried into every report for that period, so twenty portfolios do not need twenty copies of the same paragraph.
- Shared text (changes rarely) — Standing content that is the same everywhere and almost never changes — disclaimers, contact details, regulatory wording, a strategy description. Edit it in one place and every report picks it up at the next build.
- Images — Cover photography, manager portraits, diagrams. Swapped in place without touching the layout around them.
- Free text and footnotes — One-off text tied to a single report — a heading, a note under a chart, an explanation of something unusual this period.
Why this matters — The distinction between these is the difference between an hour and a morning. Writing a paragraph as market commentary rather than as free text in one report means it lands in every report that needs it, correctly dated, with no copying. If you find yourself pasting the same sentence twice, it belongs in one of the shared kinds — ask us to convert it.
Placeholders
Text can contain placeholders that fill themselves in when the report is produced — the portfolio name, the period, a return figure, a model code. Write the sentence once with a placeholder in it and it stays correct for every portfolio and every period, instead of being a thing someone has to remember to update.
The placeholders available in your templates are set up during onboarding. If you are writing a sentence and find yourself about to type a number that the report already knows, ask us for a placeholder instead.
Building a page
Where you do lay out a page, it is built from blocks — text, an image, a table, a chart, a dynamic field — dragged into position. Blocks carry your house styling with them, so a page assembled this way comes out consistent with the rest of the pack without anyone checking fonts or margins. There is no HTML to write and no way to break the layout by accident.
Reviewing before it goes out
The reason automated reporting is faster is not that nobody reads the output. It is that reading the output is all that is left. A good review is short and specific:
- Read the commentary against the figures beside it. The most common error in an automated pack is not a wrong number — it is a sentence written before the numbers finalised, or carried over from last period.
- Check anything blank. A chart or table that renders empty almost always means something it depends on is missing rather than something being broken. See Why a chart is empty.
- Look at the period label. Confirm the report is dated as you expect, particularly the first cycle after a change.
- Skim one report end to end, then spot-check the rest. Because every report in a pack comes off the same template, a fault in one is usually a fault in all of them — and a report that is fine is usually evidence the others are too.
Approving and distributing
Reports move through a status as they go: in progress while the data and writing are being finalised, ready once they are complete, approved when someone has signed them off, and published or sent when they reach clients. Who can approve is configured for your firm — some clients want a second pair of eyes before anything leaves, others do not.
Going back to an earlier period
Reports are kept as produced. You can go back to a previous period and see exactly what was sent, which matters when a client asks about something from six months ago, and matters more if you are ever asked to demonstrate what was reported at the time. Reissuing a historical report reproduces it as it stood, rather than rebuilding it with everything learned since — a distinction worth being precise about when the request is a compliance one.
Common tasks
| You want to… | How it works |
|---|---|
| Write this period’s commentary | Edit the commentary field on the report. Market commentary flows to every report for the period; portfolio commentary stays with that portfolio. |
| Replace an image | Open the report, select the image, upload the replacement. The layout around it does not move. |
| Update a disclaimer everywhere | Edit the shared text field once. Every report using it updates at the next build — do not edit it report by report. |
| Add a chart or table to a report | Ask us. We add it to the template so it applies consistently, rather than to one report where it will drift. |
| Resize or move something | Ask us. Layout changes belong in the template. |
| Compare against a peer group or competitor set | Ask us to configure the comparison group on the portfolio, then the peer charts and tables become available to your template. |
| Add a new portfolio | Send us the details. We configure it and apply the template it belongs to. |
| Change a benchmark | Ask us. Benchmarks drive a large part of the report, so they are configured centrally and checked. |
| Reissue a past period | Open that period’s report and reproduce it as it was. |
| Show something the library does not cover | Tell us what you want to show. If it can be built as a standard component we will build it; if it is genuinely bespoke there are ways to handle that too. |
Why a chart is empty
An empty chart or a row of dashes is usually the report telling you something rather than failing. In order of likelihood:
- Something it compares against is not configured. Anything measuring the portfolio against a benchmark, a peer group or a cash rate needs that thing to exist. Without it there is nothing to calculate, so the widget renders a dash or nothing at all. This is by far the most common cause.
- The track record is too short. A five-year column on a two-year portfolio has nothing to show. Reports can be set to fit the columns to the available history so this resolves itself.
- The data does not reach the reporting date. Reports can be set to render nothing rather than show a stale figure, which is usually the right choice for anything client-facing.
- The underlying detail is not available. Anything that looks inside funds to the individual companies they hold needs that detail to exist for those funds.
If none of those explains it, send us a ticket — see Help & support.