Aloha, everyone! As you all know, CiviCRM is shipped with a lot of useful report templates for each CiviCRM entities. You can use these templates to create difference report instances to interrogate your data.

However, if you are report geeks like us, you might sometimes find that the existing templates don’t quite give you the flexibility you need. There is the excellent extended reports extension which you should definitely check out here; but if you are trying to do something a bit more complex; or looking for a graphical output then your may still be exporting your data into Excel or Google sheets to do more analysis…

The CiviCRM Pivot Report extension intends to change all that by providing a powerful pivot table functionality, directly within the CiviCRM interface!

You can download it now from the CiviCRM extension directory and it is also available for instant install by your usual methods within the extension “Add New” tab in your CiviCRM admin menu.

*For those who are a little bit more numbers oriented, you may be familiar with the concept of “Pivot tables” from spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel, Libre Office or Google Sheets.

Overview

For those who are familiar with the Activity Pivot Report extension we released in early 2016, this extension has everything Activity Pivot Report extension has and much more.

CiviCRM Pivot Report uses a d3 based pivot table library to provide users a highly flexible drag'n'drop UI which enables them to structure the x and y dimensions of a report for most (we’re still waiting on a few!) major CiviCRM entities. Report data can be filtered via any data field and can be counted/ calculated in different ways.

Whats more, the pivot reports can be transformed to different charts or exported as CSV/ TSV files.

Supported entities and data

CiviCRM Pivot Report supports all following entities and they can be found from the top CiviCRM menu Reports -> Pivot Report.

• Activity

• Case

• Contribution

• Membership

• Prospect (if the CiviCRM Prospect Extension is installed - more details on that shortly!)

CiviCRM Pivot Report will work with any of the main data fields for an entity (including any custom fields that you have added!).

Building a report

Let's take the example of building a report based on contribution data.

To do so you navigate to Reports -> Pivot Report -> Contribution to open the contribution pivot report.

You might want to analyse the contributions broken down by “Financial Type” and “Payment Method”. In this case, you can simply find the “Financial Type” field from the axes pool on the left hand side and drag it into the X axes area. Then drag the “Payment Method” field into the Y axes area.

You can now see the a table showing:

• the number of contribution you received per “Financial Type” per “Payment Method”

• the total number of contributions per “Financial Type” regardless of “Payment Method” in the last column

• the total number of contributions per “Payment Method” regardless of “Financial Type” in the last row

Filter and calculation

Now since you have a table of all your contributions broken down by “Financial Type” and “Payment Method”, you might want to filter it to only see the contributions made in 2017.

In order to do so, you can simply find the “Received Date” field in the axis pool and click on the filter button. Because the field we are filtering is a date field, you will be able to narrow down the records by specifying the date range in the filter popup. Once confirmed, the result in the table will only include the contributions whose “Received Date” is within 2017.

Also instead of seeing the counts of the contributions, you may want to see the sums of “Total Amount” instead. You can achieve that by changing the calculation from “Count” to “Sum” and select the field “Total Amount” to sum with from the second dropdown list revealed.

Save and Load Report Configurations

Now you have created a report with a few axes, you also added some filters and changed the calculations. You might look at the nice report and wonder “great, now do I need to do this again next time I want to see the same report?”

Don’t you worry, you can also save report configurations!

On your report, click on "Save As New" button and type in a name for your report in the popup then click on “OK”. Your report configuration is saved at this point. When you come back to the report next time, by simply selecting the configuration from the dropdown list, you will be able to reproduce any complicated report in no time.

Export and Charts

Once you have built your perfect report, there are many ways you can interrogate your report result further. In CiviCRM Pivot Report, you can always export your report as a CSV/ TSV file to perform more spreadsheet magic. While if you want to see a more graphic view of your data, the extension is shipped with multiple chart and graph views which you can transform your report to.

Large Dataset Handling

The previous iteration of the extension struggled to work quickly with large (>100k) datasets. We've worked hard to add a solution to this and now have a "caching" solution to help speed up data loading time.

A "Pivot Report Cache Build (chunk)" scheduled job is now available once the extension is installed. Each time the job is executed, it will build cache for all data records or a part of the data records if necessary. It might take a few executions to complete the cache building for your entire dataset depending on your dataset size but this will allow the entire cache building process to be handled in the background without bringing any performance impact to the normal usage of the system.

Also, with "CiviCRM Reports: Admin Pivot Report" permission, admins will be able to view the last cache refresh time via "Administer -> Pivot Report Configuration" and manually refresh the entire cache when needed.

Future developments

We have big plans for this extension and hope to reach a level of feature parity with the existing reporting solution within CiviCRM in the not too distant future (including ability to add as dashlets and also email reports). We’ll also be making it all “Shoreditch” in time for the release of the new theme!

Download and Install

Enough talking and it’s time to try it out yourself.

The CiviCRM Pivot Report releases can be found in CiviCRM extension directory and also in Compucorp Github.

Please note that you need the latest stable CiviCRM 4.7 to use this extension.

If you're a small organization with minimal or straightforward income from CiviCRM, you probably are happy with using CiviCRM income reporting for the purpose it was originally designed, i.e. for helping you engage with your constituents.

But if you are larger, use a payment processor, and your reporting needs are more complex (e.g. a political party that needs to report income rather carefully), then you will have run into the challenge of reconciling payment processor income in CiviCRM against your bookkeeping system and bank account. This is especially true if you are using a payment processor that deposits money into your bank account somewhat erratically in batches. In that case, matching up which of your contribution payments in CiviCRM are being deposited into your bank account, and when, becomes very laborious.

We've had a couple of organizations looking for help with this, so the latest iATS Payments Extension comes with a new report to partially help with this problem.

First, here's a better description of the problem.

1. Typically, income categorization is done in an automated or semi-automated way in CiviCRM. So for example, which income is assigned to special funds, or which is actually taxes paid that needs to be separated out.

2. Your bookkeeping relies on your bank account statements to reflect the income collected via CiviCRM.

3. Your monthly income as reported in CiviCRM will only rarely exactly match the income showing up in your bank account.

The reasons it might not match are numerous (administrator error, chargebacks, and differing timezones are the three main ones), and the only way to really get it right is to be able to identify which of the payments showing in CiviCRM actually ended up in the bank, and when.

Things like cheques, or anything that is just reported in CiviCRM but doesn't transact in CiviCRM, is relatively easy to match up. But payments that go through a payment processor can be very hard to match because they will get bundled up and deposited at a time later than that showing up in CiviCRM. For example, in Canada, these are often bundled by credit card type each day.

The approach that we use (and what the clients were doing previously, manually) is to make use of the payment processor reports as an interim layer of reconciliation. Specifically, if we can match up the appropriate contributions in CiviCRM against those recorded in the payment processor, then the batches getting deposited into the bank account should be reconcilable.

Note that this strategy assumes that the payment processor is only used with CiviCRM, and it can only reconcile the income in CiviCRM that corresponds to the income going through the payment processor, but in cases where for example the occasional manual payments get put through a payment processor, this strategy will help identify them.

The way the payments in the processor reports get matched against the entries in CiviCRM is with the use of the contribution "invoice ID", a globally unique and immutable (and illegible to people ...) string assigned to each contribution. Because that string is passed to the payment processor and stored there, it can also be used to match back against the CiviCRM payment information. There's also a separate transaction id that is generated at the payment processor and sent back to CiviCRM, which is also useful.

Ready to try it out? It's just a slightly altered version of the standard contribution report, with extra fields that pull in matching information from the iATS journal tables. It'll be included in the next iATS extension release (1.6.2) which is currently in beta - feel free to try it out, or you can wait for the official release. Documentation forthcoming on the extension wiki.

If you've heard of stripe you'll know it's a great platform for accepting credit card payments.  If you haven't heard of it and are reading this then you should try it out: https://stripe.com

If you already use Stripe please read to the end and upgrade to 5.0 as soon as possible.

From the Stripe website: "Stripe is the best way to accept payments online. Stripe aims to expand internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions and manage an online business."

There are three reasons I recommend it to my clients:

1. You don't need to know about PCI compliance - credit card details NEVER get sent to your CiviCRM server (they are submitted via Javascript directly to Stripe instead).
2. Sign-up is REALLY easy and quick - you certainly don't need to send them a photo of your 3rd uncle to verify your identity.
3. Fees are lower than other popular payment systems.

If you have been using Stripe with CiviCRM you'll know that the integration had become a little out of date, with many users suffering from the "Stripe token not passed" and other issues.

That has now changed! Some of you will have noticed a new 5.0 release.  

• Whether on Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla
• Memberships, donations or events
• Webform CiviCRM (drupal): https://github.com/colemanw/webform_civicrm/releases/tag/7.x-4.23

How?

You can download 5.0 now from: https://civicrm.org/extensions/stripe-payment-processor or ask your system integrator for more information.

For development / feature requests / issues please see https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/stripe

Why upgrade to 5.0?

5.0 is a stable base.  We will be releasing 5.1 soon which will introduce some new features, upgrading will ONLY be supported from 5.0.

• Lot's of bugfixes.
• New CiviCRM standard IPN (using civicrm/payment/ipn/XX).
• Multiple Stripe processors supported.

What is coming in 5.1?

That all depends on what funding is offered!

• Remove requirement to have an email address in order to make a payment.
• Submit more information to Stripe (eg. contact ID / name) so it is easier for staff to review.
• Significantly improve reliability of recurring payments (and support Joomla properly for recurring payments).
• Support Cancellation of recurring payments from within CiviCRM (pending funding).

The Future?

• The Stripe platform supports a whole range of payment systems, not just credit card.  We could implement additional payment methods such as SEPA (Europe), Multibanco (Portugal).
• Charging an existing customers card.
• Notification of a failed payment in CiviCRM.

If your organisation can offer funding we can implement it!

This extension integrates the Bitpay payment processor with CiviCRM and allows you to accept payments that can be paid in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

MJW Consulting were approached by the Calyx Institute to develop a replacement for the old bitcoin extension that was no longer supported.

Download the extension from the extension directory here: https://civicrm.org/extensions/bitpay

Setup is straightforward, you have to setup an account at https://bitpay.com, "pair" your system with their API and add the payment processor to one or more contribution pages.  On the contribution page you select items to pay for in the normal way, then on the "Thankyou" page a bitpay invoice is displayed:

For detailed setup instructions please see https://github.com/nickcalyx/Bitpay-for-Civicrm/blob/1.0/docs/setup.md

This extension was funded by the Calyx Institute: https://www.calyxinstitute.org/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/calyxinstitute/status/1124095018984198145

Previous bitpay extension: https://github.com/circleinteractive/uk.co.circleinteractive.payment.bit...

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By the way, MJW Consulting have rebranded!  We now have new logo and a new website in English and Portuguese at https://www.mjwconsult.co.uk thanks to https://visuali.st/

Thank you again to all who participated in our Summer Survey. We are currently reviewing the results and already have some exciting ideas that we hope to present to the community soon, so watch this space!

 We have a Winner

We would like to congratulate Larry Kuttner, IT Manager at Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, who is our lucky winner of a $500.00 donation to the non-profit organization of his choice.

If you would like to know more about the wonderful work NESEA does, you can check them out here: http://nesea.org/about

Announcement New Payments Extension

Last but not least, in iATS continued commitment to support the CiviCRM community, we are excited to announce the Beta release of our new iATS CiviCRM payment extension. We are committed to providing the most advanced, secure & fully integrated payments platform to meet the needs of the CiviCRM community, which is why we have fully funded the development, as well as ongoing support and maintenance for this new extension.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the enhanced features users can expect, with many more to come:

• Upgraded security features & reduced PCI Scope
• Quickbooks CSV. export template
• New reporting portal

We are still looking for a limited number of organizations to be part of our Beta group. If you are a CiviCRM user and would like to learn more about being part of this exclusive Beta testing pool, please fill out our website form and we will reach out to you promptly: If you are an existing iATS/CiviCRM user, stay tuned for our full launch announcement and release.

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