You’ve probably had this moment. Someone asks for a report. The board. The treasurer. A committee.
You open Find Contributions or a CiviReport template, export the results, rearrange the columns, maybe clean it up in Excel, and send it along.
That workflow kinda works, but leaves something to be desired. If you want a little more out of the reporting framework, two extensions are worth knowing about.
Extended Reports
https://github.com/eileenmcnaughton/nz.co.fuzion.extendedreport
This adds many additional report templates as noted in the README.md. It’s was/is so popular that it ranks second in the extension listing as of this post.
More variations of contribution / membership / participant reports with price set and line item data, among activity pivot reports and more.
If you already use CiviReport, it simply gives you more reports to choose from and fields to sort and filter with.
ReportPlus
https://lab.civicrm.org/extensions/reportplus
ReportPlus does a lot of the same but is unique in the fact it offers data visualization with point and click configuration.
You can turn report results into charts and simple dashboards showing things like:
- Contribution trends
- Membership counts and lapsed members
- Event participation
Both extensions also let you rearrange report columns, which is surprisingly not possible in core CiviReports.
The important thing here:
These tools still work.
But they live in the old reporting architecture, and development there has essentially stopped. Think of them as stable but largely frozen. In fact, on all new client projects I do not enable CiviReport anymore to avoid confusion of the “where to go when” problem.
The modern reporting stack in CiviCRM is SearchKit and FormBuilder.
If you invest time learning those, reporting becomes far more flexible.
These extensions are satisfactory if you want to avoid some of the overwhelm and can accept their limitations. But CiviCRM really is meant to be customized exactly how you want, so focusing on how that’s done these days would be time better spent.