Crosstab reports let you slice data up along multiple dimensions, so you can perform fine-grained comparison across tenants, activity types, staff members, and properties.
Crosstab reports help you answer questions like:
- How long does it take different staff members to complete different types of work orders, such as hot/cold calls?
- Which properties are responsible for a disproportionate number of lighting requests?
- Which tenants require the most time logged on electrical issues?
What these seemingly unrelated questions have in common is that they require data to be grouped along two dimensions at once, such as staff member and work order type, or location and work order type, or tenant and work order type.
Crosstab report attributes
You can specify up to four attributes when creating a crosstab report.
Time period
The time period attribute determines the date range that the chart covers. The menu consists primarily of a set of rolling time periods that end on the present day and extend a certain amount of time into the past. For example, setting the time period to “Past two weeks” will create a report that extends from 14 days back to the present day.
Rolling time periods are useful for creating saved reports that are always up to date with the most recent data. But if you are interested in looking at a fixed historical period, simply choose “Custom date range” and choose a specific start and end date.
Metric
The metric attribute allows you to choose the metric being tabulated. Currently there are four metrics you can report on:
- Request opened. The number of new requests opened in a given time period.
- Request closed. The number of requests closed in a given time period.
- Resolution time. The average amount of time between request creation and request close.
- Time logged. The amount of actual staff time spent on a request, as indicated in logged time records.
Group by
Choose a first category to group the data by. For example, if the metric you chose is “logged time,” then choosing “staff member” as the first grouping will show you the total amount of logged time for each staff member over the specified time period.
And group by
Choose a second category to group the data by. Continuing the previous example, if you choose activity type as a second grouping then you will see the total time logged by each staff member for each activity type over the specified time period.
Reading the crosstab chart
The crosstab report, pictured above, packs a lot of information into a single chart.
The primary grouping is shown along the y-axis of the chart. The metric being analyzed is shown along the x-axis. And the color of each data point on the plot represents the secondary grouping.
You can hover over any individual data point to see details.
The data points in each primary grouping is joined by a horizontal line that visually shows the complete range of values for that grouping. Each horizontal line is crossed by a vertical hash mark that shows the average value across all data points in that grouping.
Statistical significance in crosstab results
Tikkit’s crosstab reports are good at exposing variation across groups, but not all variation is meaningful. If Bob has responded to only one hot/cold call ever and Alice has also only responded to one over, it’s hard to compare their average time to resolution. One historical data point just isn’t enough to give an accurate read on how long it takes to perform an activity.
Tikkit addresses this by color-coding the groups that show meaningful variation from the norm. In technical terms, Tikkit highlights results that are statistically significant. These are the values that you can regard with confidence when trying to draw operational insights from the data. Other results may still be meaningful, but you should exercise caution when interpreting them — when more data comes in, the results might change.
Blue highlighting indicates above average results. Green highlighting indicates below average results.
Crosstab downloads
As with all reports, you can download the data set underlying each crosstab report. The downloaded data set includes not just the crosstab data itself, but also supplementary information about the number of data instances underlying each data point and the statistical significance of any variation from the mean for each data point.
So, for example, if the report indicates that it takes Bob three hours to handle hot/cold calls, the download will also tell you that that figure is based on a historical record of 18 hot/cold calls, and whether that is enough data to indicate whether Bob is slow or fast.