External reporting

In this chapter you have found lots of useful explanation about reporting within CiviCRM. Very useful but with two underlying assumptions: 1. You want to report directly on your "production" CiviCRM database with real-time data 2. You only want to report on data in CiviCRM, not on any data from other applications or combined data from many applications.

There are also lots of possibilities to create reports, dashboard or data transformations outside CiviCRM using tools like Metabase, Tableau, Power BI, RapidMiner, Pentaho to name just a few! There are many tools that can produce reports, overviews, dahsboards etc. The CiviCRM database is accessible with these kind of tools, either with a direct link to the MySQL or Maria database or potentially with the CiviCRM API.

Explaining how to do this is outside the scope of this document but if you do not have the necessary skills within your organization you can always contact your CiviCRM experts (or whoever supports you with CiviCRM or reporting).