Name: Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates
Uploaded: 2026-08-20T18:30:48.045Z
Duration: 57 min 12 s
Description: Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates

Transcript for "Reporting with Summary Fields and Aggregates": Hello, everybody. Welcome to this month's session here. This is an eTapstree webinar about, reporting with summary fields and aggregates. I'm gonna be explaining what these types of, things are and how they might be very useful for your, organization as we, you know, as we kind of, you know, get into, like, maybe comparing year over year or something like that. I actually will, if you'll humor me for a moment, every time I I think about the word aggregates, I used to work with somebody in the eTapstreet support department. This was probably, golly, twenty years ago now. And, we were doing these types of webinars and stuff. And he once did a webinar that he wanted to call aggregates or aggregate. And I always think about that every time I see that word. So, but no. I, they are very useful. These are both very useful keys, but, key things, but they are used very differently at times. So I'm going to be kind of going through that. But before we get started, just to do a little bit of, housekeeping here. Those of you who've attended here before know that audio and video for this webinar is going to be broadcast through your computer speakers and your computer monitor. If you notice anything weird about the visual or the audio or what have you, you know, just refresh your browser. That typically will resolve most of issues when it comes to the broadcast side of things. At worst, you might have to close your browser down, reopen, and rejoin the the session, but hopefully, you wouldn't have to do that. You know, you can always this says use the, q and a section to submit questions or raise your hand. Just use the chat section. That helps, everybody because, that's something that, that everybody can see. And as I, get to any of those questions that I can, that I can answer in the session, that will also, be a little bit easier for everyone to be able to, to take a look at. I do have three links in the docs section where, just some links about, summary fields, what the summary fields are that are available to you, and some working with aggregates and so forth. And, at any point in time, you will be, you know, you you will have the little cogwheel there to adjust any settings as need be. And, I don't know if there's a, survey at the end, but if if you are taken to a survey, please feel free to leave feedback. It helps us out a great deal. I do know that, if you have any recommendation recommendations for future sessions, I have been, putting those into the calendar. I think you'll notice that there are some, some sessions coming up, in, September, October, and November that might sound kind of familiar to what you've seen in the chat section, in past sessions. Also, I'm always happy to see everybody, introducing themselves in the, you know, in the chat. It's always great to to see some returning faces, some new names also. But, please feel free to, speak up at any point during this session. I am happy to, answer what questions I can, and I'm sure everybody, I always say that this is a wonderful little community that we've built in these webinars. I I always enjoy when everybody is saying hi to each other or or talking, talking to each other in the chat. Most of you have been here long enough to know who I am. But for those who may be new, I like to think that, word-of-mouth travels beyond these sessions and and, you know, it you know, like like a really good movie, you know, word-of-mouth gets out and then suddenly, you know, new people show up to to listen to to what I blather on about. But I am Jeff Arbuckle, customer success manager. Been here for, getting close to twenty one years. At the end of November, it'll be twenty one years. Located in Beech Grove, Indiana, which is a small village inside of Indianapolis. Comic book and movie fan. In fact, just last weekend, I was in Chicago for Fan Expo. Spent a lot of money on comic books. Got to see a couple of panels with the the likes of John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, William Shatner. It was a fun time. I am nicely, rested up and back, back ready to, talk about ETAP stuff with you. Alright. So with that, let's just dive in to, the topic here. And I think to to really get into the topic, we really need to define what these features or concepts are inside of eTapestry. So what's the you know, what is a summary field? Well, a summary field or the summary fields, I should say, are found in a category of fields available in reports. Summary fields pull information from the accounts that are brought into a query. That ultimately means, and we'll see this a little bit more in my examples that I'm going to, do in my database. But that means that if you have a account return type query, you could still potentially get some giving information, that has been summarized for you. You know, and so this is a feature to to really kinda quickly view how much someone gave, like, in their lifetime, during one of the last five years or five fiscal years, the exact amount or date of their largest or first donation, or even how many transactions they have in their account. Some of the information is you that is used here is found actually on the home page of a constituent's account. So that's where those summary fields are coming from. If you've ever searched for somebody's name and you clicked on it, you go to the home page, you can see there will be tiles there that will say, like, five year giving summary or something like that. Those are ultimately summary fields that can be utilized in a report. Now as far as aggregates are concerned, these are a set of settings for journal fields. So aggregate options are found whenever you select a column, for a report like, date, received, fund, etcetera. And you see those little, three little dots there where you can open up the various options that are available to you. There's an aggregate field there where you can make some selections there to kind of aggregate information for that column. Again, I'll I'll kind of show how that is, done here, shortly. But these are specifically useful for journal entries. In fact, they can only be used with journal entry return type queries. But options can include things like the maximum gift amount, the minimum gift amount, the first gift, the last gift, the average gift, etcetera. Now you'll see an asterisk there on that line in the slide, and sometimes asterisks are like, the word but in the middle of a sentence. You don't always know what's going to come after that. In short, I will say that these aggregate options, some will not work with certain selected fields or selected columns, like date. Only some of the aggregates will work with a date field, which is a little unfortunate for a couple of the options, but but we'll we'll kinda get into that caveat later. But, and certainly, the, the while you will still see the aggregate option for, like, things like the account name or something of that nature. Those aren't going to have any kind of aggregated information. These are specifically for journal fields. Now in summary, the brass tacks are that, summary fields are a summary of giving throughout the entire account. Aggregates are options for selected report columns that can, quote, unquote, do math based on what's selected one year ago, two year ago, average, maximum, etcetera. Aggregates will only work if the queries are journal entry return type queries, but summary fields can work with account return type queries. They can also work with journal entry return type queries, but they can but they are most notably usable for account return type queries. And I'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment too. But, the other thing about the, about the aggregate is that it will take information from the query. So, like, for example, if you have a query of all time giving, you can use the aggregated, you know, columns for one year ago, two year ago, three year ago, year to date, and so forth. So that's going to be also something that's key is that the query has to provide enough journal entries to provide, you know, the ability to aggregate that. But we'll talk a little bit more about that here in just a moment. Which one that you may want to use will be entirely dependent upon the situation, the data return type of your queries, and your end goal. What is it that you are wanting to see here? If it is a little bit more basic, you just wanna see what what giving has been over the last few years, it will be, you know, likely the summary fields that you will use. If you are wanting to see specific information about specific funds or specific approaches, then we might wanna look at, you know, doing the aggregate type of, of information. Alrighty. So much like our other, recent webinars, I figured the best way to talk about all of this is just to hop into the test database and kinda play around with these concepts and ideas. So just give me a moment here. I'm gonna stop sharing my slides. Sorry for the jump scare. Here I am. But now I'm going to share my screen. Just give me a moment while that gets set here, and that should be coming up here shortly. Alright. So you should be seeing my screen now, hopefully. Alright. So as with anything with report related, let's first start by talking a little bit about some queries that I have here. Two queries in particular that I'm going to use for our examples, because they are I know what's inside my own personal, account inside my test database. So if I go into queries, I click on base. You will see here I have Jeff query, which is just a, a custom account query where I'm the only person listed. I've got a data return type of accounts, so we'll remember that here for just a moment. And I also have Jeff j e query, which are my, I'm gonna remove this. And so what this is going to be is just going to be all of the transactions in my account. Okay? I'm utilizing my, custom account query with just my name as my starting query, and I'm just pulling all of the journal entry transactions into this list. In fact, if we preview this, we will see that. See, I'm the only name here, but you see all of my transactions and what my, grand total received has been. I'm very I I am very, I'm very kind with my money to my own personal organization here as you'll see. That's that's a that's a pretty healthy number there, but just joking. That's just the when I need to test something out, I just always use my account here. So, now if we are talking about it's like, okay. I would like to see what accounts have given over the last five years or so just to kinda get an idea of what the, the activity has been. What is it that people have done up to the present date of the current year and the previous five years. There are technically two ways that we can do this. Both of them well, both of the ways will be dependent upon what query that you have here. So if we go back to my base category, we say, okay. Well, we've got an account return type query. These are all the donors that that gave in that time frame. Well, in that situation, we would utilize the summary fields. Now it like I said, we can do the aggregates as well because we also have a journal entry return type query that I was just showing you, and so we can aggregate columns. But let's start with the summary fields because this is a little bit more of a straightforward process. So I'm gonna go into reports here. You click on manage reports, and I'm going to create a new category here just so that we know where all of this stuff can be found. I'm gonna go in here, and I'm gonna create a new report. So we're gonna call this the summary report. Of course, you always have the option to make this a favorite report where you can get right to it from the, either from the reports menu where you see your, favorites listed, or you can see it from the home page tile for your favorite queries, reports, and communication templates. You can also make it private or read only if you just want only yourself or other admins to be able to view this or make any changes. Now because we're going to work directly from a an account return type query, I'm not gonna worry too much about the group results section here. Although, one thing you could potentially do with accounts, and, I may be, heading a question off. I think Cindy asked about, about, households in the past. I might be heading off a question at the past here. You could, with an account return type query, say I wanna group by household, and then the head of household would appear, for this. But we're not gonna worry about that right now. We're just not gonna group anything, because we're going to be working from an account list. So it's just everybody's just going to be listed once anyway. From here, we can say, okay. Well, I want to include account name. If I want to include all the contact information, address lines, city, state, postal code, all of that stuff, I could do that. But for my purposes here, I just wanna work primarily from the summary fields, and just have my account name and see giving information. Now like I said on that slide, the summary fields are an entire category of report columns that you can utilize. Now what's really kinda cool here is that there are a lot of summary fields, and these are all things that pull directly from the home page. And I'll show that here in just a moment as well from each account. But you'll see here everything listed in alphabetical order, we have, like okay. Well, if you ever wanna see the grand total of how much somebody is behind on their pledge, the arrears total would be available. But you you'll see here it'll say, like, first gifted amount, first gifted date. You'll also have first transaction information. Now what's the difference between first transaction versus first gift? Well, a gift would only the gifted the first gifted amount or the first gifted date would only look at gifts or recurring gifts. First transaction date and first transaction amount, transaction would also not only include gifts and recurring gifts, but would also include the, the payments to pledges. So it's any kind of transaction would be included with the, you know, this first transaction date or first transaction number. Just remember that whenever you see, you know, gifted, pledged, received, it it's going to take those definitions into consideration where it's like, okay. Well, if there is a gifted, it's only going to be recurring gifts or gift one time gifts. Pledge would only look at pledges. Received would also look at, the received amounts that are put in for, you know, the, you know, the gift the recurring gift or the or the pledge payment. Sorry. Brain was, fogging over there for a second. Now transaction may also potentially include, other types of concepts like it may also include things like disbursements and so on. But, usually, you would say, okay. If I wanna know the first time anybody gave anything, I would say stick with received. Received is always the, the kind of the rule of thumb for whenever you wanna see when somebody has given something to you. So if I wanted to know when the first received date or the first received amount was, I can include that here. But you'll notice here, we get down to we have fiscal fields that you can choose from. So those who might be more interested in fiscal year numbers would be, you know, would be available here. You have fiscal year to date, fiscal one year ago, two year ago, three year ago, four year ago, five year ago. Okay? You will also see that there are, you know, there are other fiscal options that will say, like, five fiscal year ago for receive. The you know, it's just a matter of of finding the exact received fields that you want ultimately, but you'll see that these are all in, you know, in alphabetical order. But another set of fields that are found here under summary fields that I would recommend are, or potentially recommend would be these lifetime no. So, like, what's the lifetime received total somebody has given? Totally. And you can also see the minus nondeductible now. So for those of you who may operate with nondeductibles in your gifts, nondeductible can be considered here for, you know, for the lifetime, for each individual year and so forth. You'll also find lifetime transaction count. That's going to tell you the number of transactions that person has in their in their journal. And, again, it's transaction. So it's like, you know, the number of actual, you know, financial transactions that they have had in the system. And, yes, Cindy, that's an excellent point. You also have the lifetime received and soft credit amount. That's also included. Yes. Absolutely. So soft credit is available there as well, and that is also true for each of the individual years. But I'm going to work primarily from the from the calendar years just, just to kinda make things a little bit easier on myself. I can also come down here to received, so I can receive to date soft credit and, or I'm sorry, receive to date received and soft credit or receive to date received minus non deductible, or I can do year to date received total. I could also find out, well, how many gifts did they did that person give in that year to date, summary as well. So that would be available. But let me just kinda go up here to one year ago received, and then I'm gonna include two year ago received. We'll do three year ago received. Oh, excellent question, Cindy. What is the difference between raised and received? That is an excellent, excellent question. Received is physical received amounts. So that is gift, recurring gift, pledge payment. It can also, you know, so that's that's what you would be looking at there. So that would be actual physical received money. Raised is gift, recurring gift, and pledge. It's the total amount of the pledge. So some people, some folks want to look at the total possible received, or, you know, that they would receive over time, which would also basically saying, let's just assume that pledges are going to be paid off. Raised would be the number that you would want there. So raised would look at gift, recurring gift, pledged amount. Received is gift, recurring gift, and payment to that. So that would be what you would, what you would look like there. Now as far as this, we can also, there would also be four and five. If you want that, you can include that as well. But once we save and run this, if you want a report that does not include pledges or pledge payments, you would choose gifted at that point. Gifted, Cindy, would be what you would want there. So here, I'm going to choose my account receipt or my account return type because that's where the summary information can be found. Gonna remember this, for the next time I run the report. And when I display the results on screen, you will see here, okay. There's my account name. There's my first received date. Here's my first received amount. So you can see eleven years ago, I made a $600 gift. Here's my lifetime received total. Here's my lifetime transaction count. Here's my, received, year to date, one year ago, two year ago, three year ago. So this is just a summary, the summary of all of that information being kind of brought in. And because it's an account return type query, it is pulling this information. If I click on my account here, you will see, yeah, five year summary. So whenever you see the word summary, that's where those types of fields are being pulled from the, you know, into that, report. So it, you know, it is utilizing account total information. Right? But like I said, if you wanted it to be a little bit more specific. Right? Like or you have a journal entry return type query that you're working with. So let's talk about that here. So if we go back to reports here, I'll go back to my category. Now here, when I do an aggregate because I'm working with a journal entry return type query. Now if you remember, that journal entry return type query had, all of my individual transactions listed. Right? Now the big difference here that I want to work from is is that I would want to group my results here. So I do wanna make sure that I'm grouping by account. And for aggregates, you really do want to collapse group so that everything ends up on a single line. Right? And down here for our, report columns, we have all of the same options here. So you can do account name, you can do address fields, whatever. But if you want to, you know, utilize the aggregate version, you wouldn't really need to select any of the summary fields. What you can do instead is select received multiple times. So, like, here, you see each time I click it, I'm adding an additional receive. Then I can come in here and I can say, year to date received, one year ago, received. And just to be fun here, I'm going to do average received, and I'm going to do largest received. Okay? Now I'm gonna come in here to the settings, and I'm going to say, okay. So for this field here, I have this aggregate field. I can select year to date. Now you'll also notice there is also has fiscal as an option as well. So you can do fiscal years here with the aggregates as well. But I'm gonna do year to date. And for one year ago, just select one year ago. For two year ago, I'm going to select two year ago. Oh, wait. Sorry. I accidentally there we go. Two year ago. And then you'll also notice so there are options here for average. Now some you wouldn't really necessarily need to use because if you're collapsing groups, if you just have a receive field, it's already adding up everything in that in that column. Right? Now but you can do count, and it would say these are the number of gifts that have a received number, you know, and that could that could be used. I'll I'll show you the max here in just a moment, but, we'll select average for average received. And for largest, we will choose max. Now here's where one of those caveats comes in. Unfortunately now it kinda makes sense for some in average and, technically, for count, I guess. But, the date fields, these aggregates here, some average min, max, and count don't actually work for those date fields. But they can work for these first, last, second, you know, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, last. So there is a little bit of a caveat. It's it's kind of an unfortunate thing. We wouldn't be able to say, okay. From this query, what's the maximum you know, what was the date of the largest get now the summary field would still exist for that. But, unfortunately, the, the date fields don't play nice with, with these, you know, especially the minimum and maximum. That's something I'm sure is probably in the, idea bank. But, unfortunately, you just have to keep that in mind that if you wanted to see what the maximum amount was and when it was given, the date with the max aggregate would not work. But if I wanted to, I can include let me pull in the date field. I can say when was the first gift given, and I can pull in another. And also do first. Now once you have all of this set up and you'll notice there that I did change the name of these. You can change the name of these columns before you even have them export out, by, you know, utilizing this kind of light gray box to kinda type in a new name. So I kind of I went over that before I explained it. But, yes, you can, you you can always edit the name of the columns so that it will reflect that on the export. Right, Cindy. Yeah. Unfortunately, the the aggregate does not work on the max, for date. So that's where you would probably want to fall back on the, on the summary field of largest gift date, largest gift amount. Those summary fields would still be available for you. I mean, you can still utilize the summary fields even if you are working from a journal entry return type query. So you would be able to bring in the summary fields for largest, received date. The average min oh, so, Judith, those average minimum maximum, those are still going to work off of what the query gives you. So the query will still say what my average received based on the query amount. Now so if you if you have limited the the, the you know, just for this year or something, that's where you will be able to utilize the the average. It would say, okay. Here's the average based on this time frame of these gifts. So now let's save and run this, And I'm going to select this query here, my, journal entry return type query. I'm gonna display the results on screen. And now you'll see, okay. Here's my year to date, one year ago, two year ago. My average is this amount. My largest received was, $22.50. Now, oh, I did not change the name of the day here. My first gift was 10/15/2015, which was the same as what we saw in the summary field, for first. And then, my first received was $600. Now I can go in here. You can always click on this and go into the journal and see oh, okay. Well, here's 820. 8424 was my largest there. Meredith. Yes. So if the query report included multiple donors, the summary and aggregate fields would, would be listed for each unique account. That is correct. I'm sorry. I didn't mention that at the at the, at the start there, Meredith. Yeah. I was just using my test database because I knew there would be information there that would definitely be five years' worth. But yes. So each individual account would have their own summarized information. So, like, let's say, John Smith. And, you know, if he was the next line down, you would see what he gave last year, what he gave this year, what he gave, you know, first time, the the largest gift amount or what have you. And for Judith, yes. So, year to date giving for capital and year to date for, annual fund, you know, so that type of stuff, it would have to be separated because the the the aggregates are looking at, okay. Here's the here's the received column based on what the query gives. It doesn't have a way to say, okay. Now split that received column into two different funds, or two different approaches or two different campaigns or whatever, or a fund and a campaign. So, that might be something that would be good for the idea bank. Yes. I think that where we would, you know, where we would potentially have the the opportunity here is to be able to say, okay. If we have selected fund, we want to have a separate column for each individual fund, and then each one of those could have an aggregate. That would be, you know, that that could be a a potential that could be a game changer for some folks, honestly. But, but yeah. So, like, if you wanted to see, like, the year to day day giving for capital, just you know, you would create a query that would have that capital campaign or capital fund or whatever. And then you would do another query for the annual fund and then run it you can run it through the same report, but it wouldn't, but you would be able to you would have to do that in separate reports. Right. That's, yeah, that's one of those things that that, you know, it's like the the summary fields the summary fields are great for quick information. Right? Because it's looking at the entirety of the account. Right? It's saying regardless of the of the fund or the approach or the campaign, this is just what they gave last year. Right? The aggregates are can be very helpful, and I think a lot of people have found a lot of helpfulness when we are looking at it from a, let's see here. If you're looking at it from just trying to get some, you know, trying to take a a list of journal entries and break them out throughout the, you know, through the course of the year, aggregates have been incredibly helpful. Now, of course, the the complexity of that can create a little bit of an issue. Right? Because the way that the that the columns work for the reports aren't exactly always as easy to to work with if you are trying to compare, you know, what what somebody has done to a particular fund compared to a particular campaign compared to a particular approach. But the one advantage that these that these reports do have or these possibilities have for you is the ability to be able to say, okay. Well, you know, I wanna be able to see what the average received amount was for these gifts or what the, you know, and I didn't even really kinda get into the first, second, third, fourth, fifth. If you have if you have people who've given multiple times, you can say, okay. Here's what their first gift was. Here's what their second gift was. You could even potentially track just dollar amount raises or dips, you know, from one gift to the next even. That's what these first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and last would be able to do. So if I were to have those aggregates in, you know, I could potentially track a a, little bit of, like, a line graph of, okay. Well, somebody you know, they gave more the first time than they did the second time, and they you know, why did they never give as much as the first time, or why are they on a downward path? Or, oh, they're on an upward path, and then each gift grew over time. That's one of those, you know, that's one of the real advantages of these aggregates is that ability to kind of track that line and and be able to see that from one gift to the next or from one year to the next. Cindy here. So, I can make two reports, one for our capital campaign gifts, pledges, and pledged payments, then I can do a second report for annual giving, recurring gifts, pledges, and pledged payments by fund. Yeah. Yeah. You could do that. Yeah. So you would what and the good thing is is that, honestly, you it would be conceivably one query, one report that you would have to build. You'd build your first one for the capital campaign. You build your report. You run it through the report with whatever aggregates or or summary fields or what have you would you that you wanted to use. Then, although if you are I will say if you are working with a specific fund, a specific campaign, or a specific approach, you would certainly want to utilize the aggregates on the fields as opposed to the summary fields. Remember, summary fields look at the account as a whole, not what's limited based on the, query that you gave it. But the other thing you could also, so, like, you know, you build your query for your capital campaign. You build your report that has all of your fields with your aggregates. And then after you run them and you export that, go back to the query, change that for, you know, the fund or you can remove it and just have everything or whatever, and you would have your date range and your giving. And then after you make changes to the query that you used, you've already got your report built, so you just run it through the same report. So that would be where you would get some of that. You know, there would be a little bit of a shortcut. It would be use utilizing the same report with the same aggregates. And then, of course, over time, the, the reports that you create would still not necessarily need to be affected because, you know, if you if you want to do the same thing the next year, whether you're doing things with summary fields or you're doing with, you know, with individual aggregates on these fields like this, then what you would be looking at would be well, you know, it would just be a matter of making sure that the query has the right date range or if it even has a date range, it doesn't really matter. But, it would just you know, that these aggregates would continue to be looking back appropriately. So two year ago today is 2024. Right? One year ago is 2025. Two years ago is is 2024. Next year, one year ago will be 2026 giving, and two year ago will be 2025. So it would you know, the reports will adjust as time goes on as well. It's just a matter of making sure that the query is also going to include the current stuff as well as one year ago, two year ago, and so forth. So one of the reasons why I wanted to do an entire webinar about this, even though I knew it probably wasn't going to be an hour's worth of of content of course, that depends on, you know, if any more questions come along. I wanna make sure that I answer those. But the main reason why I like I want to talk about summary fields and aggregates, oops, was that for a lot of folks, they don't know that these types of things exist. I mean, they you know, oftentimes, when somebody would come to support or they look in the knowledge base or if they've asked me, you know, about how to create a particular report, largely, they are doing just what the steps tell them to do. Right? It's like, oh, add this field, click this, do that, and, you know, move on. Unless they're specifically asking for this type of information, they don't always know that this is available to them. But you'll see here that with, like, anytime I've ever given directions on adding sort name, I've always had people open this up to adjust the visibility to turn that off because typically you don't need to see the sort name, and to set the sort order so that it knows to sort by alphabetical order. You know, most people may look past the aggregate option there, you know, and for you know, and aggregate, like I said, appears for everything even though it's not usable for, like, an address, like, address, account name, sort name, whatever. It is still there, and but people often look past that and not think to say, hey. What's this? And they just move on with what they need for the day, and they and they go on. So I often look at the summary fields and the aggregates options to be almost like a a hidden treasure or or or a trick that that you could do to get a little bit different results based on what you are providing the report. And, you know, it is something that and even when they're opening up this drop down menu, unless they're being told to select a specs a specific summary field, oftentimes people don't realize that, oh, here's this category with a whole bunch of different options that summarizes information for me. So that is you know, that's kind of the main reason why I wanted to make sure that we talk about this because there could be some really useful, information that these two concepts can provide you and can help shortcut a lot of that information too. You know, taking, an account return type query, looking for what people have done year over year, summary fields will be a really good way to just get some information about just pure dollars or pure activity that's been that's been done. And with the aggregates, you can get a little bit more, specific to a a particular fund or a particular approach. So I think these are really kind of handy, you know, something that can be really handy for folks as well. Meredith, since summary fields are also available in queries, what is the advantage of running a report rather than a query preview? Excellent question. So let's talk about the query preview and what's available there. Because, yes, there could be a potentiality to include some additional columns that are summary field related. However, this isn't a pretty short list. Right? This is first received amount, largest received amount, last, received total last year versus lifetime. These are the the main advantage will be the number of options that would be available to you. So you would have you you have some here. And, you know, kind of the same thing with all of the various different fields that are available, the query preview is a little bit more limited. Now you might just say, I just wanna see what somebody gave, you know, last year and what their largest gift was. Well, well, in that case, yeah, we can just do that through this through the query preview. But if I wanted to see year over year for two, three, four, five years, then you would want to do the report in that way. The other thing is is if this was a journal entry return type query, so let's preview that. One, you wouldn't have the ability to collapse it, so it's just one person per line. And two, you know, again, you would have you know, if you chose first received amount or first received date, it would repeat that information for journal entries all the way down for that person. So, there are advantages to just saying, okay. I've got the information I need here for all of Jeff's gifts. I'm just going to export this and send it off to him just so that he has that. That's great. But if you want to manipulate how the data appears or if you need more options for those, summary fields, then you would wanna go to a report. Exactly. So and that and as you reply to your own, comment there, yeah, you have more availability of fields, more options available to you. Reports are typically more powerful in the sense of the of the breadth of information it can display. Whereas the query preview is meant to be just just that, a previous. Like, these are the accounts that we pulled. Are these the accounts that you want? And is that, something that, you know, is that something that you might just need? Oh, this is exactly what I need. I can just export this and utilize it. Whereas, if you really wanna get a little bit more information or if you wanna manipulate how certain things are displayed, the, the report will be more powerful. Kathy. So, apologize if this is a repeat question from Judith, but, is it possible to run historical giving that includes a sum of gifts made to multiple funds? So not individually. Right? So, like, if we were looking at, like, okay. Here's the sum that Jeff gave to these funds, then, no, that would not be available just because the way that it's it's displayed like, one thing and this would be something that the the, the much smarter people than I as far as the as far as how the, the programming goes. But, like, for example, here oh, that's not the right aggregate report. That's what I what we would you know, how we would want this to be potentially shown would be either to be able to select each fund multiple times and then have a drop down menu to say which fund that would be and then aggregate that. But, yeah, that's not available right now. But that could be something that, like I said, you know, the idea bank might be a good place in the community to to take something like that. Now one thing that could be done is if we add fund. Now I apologize. This is a little bit of a, kind of off the seat of my pants. If we do fund instead of account name and we group this by fund and collapse groups, Now this is still based on this individual query. If if, you know, there would be opportunity to do a query that has all of your, information. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, hit the wrong button. Now here, this is aggregating the individual funds. So you can see here, it's like general operating. Year to date, nothing yet. But one year ago, 1,200. You know? So this is aggregating because I'm grouping this by fund, but it won't display the individual names. So you could potentially say, let's take a look at this by fund and see how it aggregates year over year. All you would have to do there is instead of choosing, like, an account name, you choose fund. And after you choose all of your other fields, you can come up here to group results, and you can group by fund. You can collapse groups. And then it would say fund you know, it would list the funds vertically, and then it would aggregate year over year based on that. Not exactly the same thing, but it is something that can be done with aggregates because you're grouping by something other than the account name. You're grouping by the funds instead. Yeah. That's that's true, dude. That that's a good point. So, like, if we were to say show group totals instead and then we included, the account name, it would display. So what would what that would show instead because I'm not collapsing groups anymore. I'm just showing the account. So it show general operating all of the gifts that are under that. But see here, the aggregate is repeating itself for each individual gift that I gave to that to that fund. That's yeah. So that's where things get a little bit of a caveat into working with those aggregates. Yeah. And then, of course yeah. I mean, utilizing that within Excel could be, you know, then it could be something that you could work with, you know, like, create, like, a pivot table to kinda swing this information out. Yeah. That sort of stuff. But yeah. Let's see. So if your query included multiple donors, say, new people, you could still see they're giving by fund or can't yeah. Absolutely. So yeah. I mean, you could still see, like, you know, if we grouped it by by fund, instead, you could say, oh, Jeff, you know, Mary Jones, John Smith, you know, so on and so. This is the gifts that they gave to that fund. The problem is is that when you're working with journal entries and they're not collapsed and you add an aggregate, it will repeat that aggregate per person per gift. But yeah. So that's why I said aggregates have a little bit more of a, they do have a caveat, to that. Just like summary fields haven't have the caveat of it's looking at the entire account, not just the journal entries based on a specific, you know, fund or approach or whatever that the query might might contain. But there are still a lot of usefulness to these, to these types of reports and how you can work with them. Alright. Let me stop sharing this, and I will come back here to this. Now, like I said, there are still some, you know, there there are still some, knowledge based articles that I included here. Of course, you have other resources at your fingertips. You can always you know, if you're working with an aggregate or if you're working with summary fields, you run into a an oddity or a question or something like that. Of course, you can reach out to support, and, you know, that can that can help you get to the right way. Of course, also, the the Blackbaud community is a great place also. That's where the idea bank is, but that's also where you can share your various, concepts or ideas and and, you know, kinda work through some folk you know, with some folks that that have also done those things. Shauna, is there an advantage when grouping by fund to group it through the, group results rather than choosing the fund in the report column? So the, the advantage of when you do a grouping by fund is that instead of it grouping by the account name or by the by the individual, it's grouping by the fund. So, like, what it would do then is it would say, okay. Here's the fund totals if you group by fund and collapse groups. Here's the here's the fund. Here's the grand total. You wouldn't be seeing the individuals that gave to the fund, but you could look at it and say, here are those totals year over year or grand total or whatever for that particular fund. So the advantage really kinda comes to how you are wanting to display the result and how you want it to be, presentable, in that regard. So that's why, you know, the group re the group report by by default at at first only says account name or household. But once you start adding additional, columns or once you start adding columns to the report, those columns become options in that, in that group by. So, you know, so that gives you the opportunity to say, I don't really care about the individuals they gave. I just wanna see the grand totals per fund or per approach or per campaign or whatever, or even something even more abstract like ZIP code or something like that where you can, you know, choose postal code as your grouping, and then it would show the grand tools per zip, postal code. So it really kinda depends on what it is that you're wanting to see and how you want to present it at that point. Now next week, of course, we have the ask the experts, so I invite anybody to come. I know that, you know, there'll probably be some questions regarding, like, you know, some opportunities with the, summary and the, and, the the various different options for aggregates. If not, of course, the ask the expert can open up into other, conversations as well. So I do hope next, Wednesday, that, I see all of you folks there. And, if you have any questions, please feel free to bring them. Please feel free to bring any, stories that you have if you play around with this and, you know, kinda talk about, like, you know, what are some of the ways that that you might have utilized this as well. That's always welcome. And, oh, yes. And, Judith, saying that, she's going to be at BBCon in Columbus, Ohio, next month. Yep. That is, right at the very end of, September, very beginning of October. And she is giving a session on planned giving. So, hopefully, anybody who is attending that will be able to do so. And, yes, Cindy, the, this is something I forgot to mention at the beginning. Recordings are always sent twenty four hours after the, end of the session. Although, usually, by the later part of the afternoon, if you just use the same link that you used to get in here, you'll be able to rewatch the presentation usually right then. So, that that should be coming to you as well. So anybody who wants to revisit some of the stuff that we talked about, you know, you'll have that recording available to you. So thank you so much for everybody who attended. Like I said, I hope this was insightful and some of the different ways that you can utilize the columns and the abilities, to to get that summarized or or very specifically aggregated information. I look forward to seeing everybody on Wednesday for our usual ask the expert, and, look forward to talking to everybody then. Thank you so much, and, look forward to seeing you then. And have a great rest of your week.