Categories, audience and rights

Three things decide what a person sees in Advanced Reports: the rights their role holds in the app, the audience of each report and dashboard, and the categories that organise the sidebar. This page covers all three.

#Rights

There are two app rights, and an admin sets both by NetSuite role under Manage, Configuration:

The Administrator role holds both rights, whatever the lists say. Admins also see every report and dashboard in the catalogue, including those whose audience does not include them. That is how an admin can find an imported report and publish it.

The server checks rights on every request. A button that is hidden in the interface is not the only protection.

#What the author right grants

The refresh runs every report's SuiteQL as Administrator, and the author controls that SQL completely. An author can therefore read any data in the account. Grant Author roles as you would grant Administrator-level read access, to a few trusted people and on purpose. The Configuration page shows the same warning beside the field.

#Audience

Every report and every dashboard has an audience. You set it on the wizard's Audience step for a report, and under Settings… for a dashboard.

• Public makes it visible to every employee.
• Otherwise, choose any mix of Roles, Employees, Departments and Subsidiaries from searchable lists. A person who matches at least one pick can open it: their current role, their own employee record, their department or their subsidiary.
• The report's owner can always open it, and so can admins.
• With nothing picked and Public off, only the owner and admins can open it.

Departments appears only when the Departments feature is on, and Subsidiaries only in a OneWorld account. Roles and Employees are always available.

Audiences apply everywhere a report appears:

• Dashboards have their own audience, and each widget also follows its report's audience. A widget over a report you cannot open shows a notice instead of data.
• The app draws Drill-through links only for viewers who may open the target report.
• NetSuite dashboard portlets get the same audience as their report, plus the owner, and they follow every change.
• Import / Export never carries an audience. New imports are visible only to their owner and admins until you set one.

#Changing audiences quickly

Every card and table row in the catalogue shows the audience, such as Public or counts of roles and employees. Click it to change it in place. To publish many reports at once, choose Select, select them with click, Ctrl+click or Shift+click, then choose Set Audience. The Dashboards page works the same way.

#Categories

Categories organise the sidebar. Each report has at most one category, and so does each dashboard. Admins manage categories under Manage, Configuration, Categories.

1. Under New Category, enter a name, a description and an icon, then choose Create.
2. Reorder categories by dragging them or with the arrows. The sidebar follows this order.
3. Tick Used for: Reports, Dashboards or both. Each box saves as soon as you tick it, and "Saved" appears beside it. The row's Save button is only for the name, icon and description.
4. To retire a category, choose Deactivate. The app deactivates a category rather than deleting it, so reports keep their reference. Reactivate brings a category back.

The report wizard offers only report categories. New Dashboard and a dashboard's Settings… offer only dashboard categories. A category created before the Used for boxes existed counts as a report category. If you untick both boxes, the app ticks Reports again, because a category must be used for something.

Admins can also create a category from the wizard's Details step without leaving the report. An import creates any category it names that does not exist yet.

The Reports group of the sidebar shows a category only when it holds at least one report you can see. Each group shows Uncategorized when any of its reports or dashboards has no category.

#Record types

Manage, Configuration, Record Types lists the record types that a report column may link to. By default it lists customer, vendor, the main transaction types, item, project and others. To add a custom record, enter its script id. If NetSuite cannot work out the record's address itself, give it a URL template containing {id}, for example /app/common/custom/custrecordentry.nl?rectype=123&id={id}. A link to a type the app cannot resolve shows as plain text.

Related: Installing in your account · Settings reference · Import and export · Adding a report to a NetSuite dashboard