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 three app rights, and an admin sets each by NetSuite role under Manage, Configuration:

The three rights are separate. An author or an admin schedules emails only when their role is also in rights.email_roles, which starts with Administrator alone.

The Administrator role holds the three 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. Another author cannot, since the author right is for building reports, not for opening every report. The wizard's Audience step and the audience dialog of the catalogue say the same.

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. A report made with Make a Copy starts the same way and never takes the original's audience.

#Changing audiences quickly

Every card and table row in the catalogue shows the audience, such as Public or counts of roles and employees.

To change one audience:

1. Click the audience on the card or the row.
2. Tick Public, or pick roles, employees, departments and subsidiaries.
3. Choose Save.

To publish many reports at once:

1. Choose Select.
2. Select the reports with click, Ctrl+click or Shift+click.
3. Choose Set Audience.

The Dashboards page works the same way.

#Categories

Categories organise the sidebar. A report can sit in several categories, like tags, and so can a dashboard: it is listed under each one. A report about purchase order lines can sit under Vendors and under Demand Planning at once. 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. A category that any report or dashboard is still filed under, archived ones included, cannot be deleted.

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.

#Filing under several categories

The wizard's Details step, New Dashboard and a dashboard's Settings… have a Categories box with a chip for each category picked.

1. Click in the box and type part of a category's name, then pick it. Pick as many as apply.
2. To take a category off, choose × on its chip, or press Backspace in the empty box.
3. With no chip at all, the report or dashboard is Uncategorized.

A category the item is already filed under that the box no longer offers, because it was deactivated or is not ticked for that use, stays as a chip marked (not offered). Saving keeps it until you remove it.

The Reports group of the sidebar shows a category only when it holds at least one report you can see. A report in two categories counts in both, so the counts can add up to more than All Reports. Each group shows Uncategorized when any of its reports or dashboards has no category at all.

Reports and dashboards from before version 1.19.0 keep their one category. The refresh job copies it into the new Categories field within a few runs, and the app reads it from the old field until then, so nothing moves in the sidebar.

#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}.
• Item links to any item and Transaction (any type) to any transaction, whatever its kind, so a column that mixes invoices, bills and journals can still link.
• A link to a type the app cannot resolve shows as plain text.

#If something looks wrong

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