Developer Diary #13

22/07/26

This release has a clear theme: Reports.

The Working Tools has always held a great deal about your Lodge, but getting that information back out in a useful shape has not always been easy. This update rebuilds the whole Reports area around a simple idea: the data is yours, so it should be quick to find, easy to read, and simple to take away.

As always, please do log in and have a look around. There's a lot here.

A major overhaul of Reports

Filter any report by Tag

You can now apply your Tags as a filter across the reports. If you keep a Tag for a particular committee, a group of Officers, a class of Candidate or anything else, you can run a report against just those Brethren rather than the whole Lodge. The filter carries through as you move between reports, so you set it once and keep it.

Five new reports

There are five entirely new reports, each built to answer a question a Lodge actually asks:

• Membership Trend - joins and leavers by year, so you can see at a glance whether the Lodge is growing or shrinking, and by how much.
• Attendance Insights - attendance over a period, which makes it far easier to spot the Brother who has quietly stopped coming, ideally before he drifts away for good.
• Arrears Report - outstanding invoices in one place, so the Treasurer can see exactly who owes what without trawling.
• Degree Progression - Members awaiting their next step, so nobody waits years for a Degree simply because they were overlooked.
• Officer Succession - the offices held and years served across the Lodge, which is a real help when you're planning who goes where, and eventually who goes into the Chair.

The Report Builder

This is the big one. The new Report Builder lets you build your own Member report from scratch: choose exactly which Members you want (with your Tag filters), and exactly which columns, then run it.

You can save a report you'll want again, so it's a click to run next time, and you can schedule it to be emailed to you (or to someone else) on a regular basis. If you like a particular list of figures in front of you before every meeting, you can now have it land in your inbox without lifting a finger.

Reports you can take away

Reports across the board can now be exported to CSV, so if you want to work your numbers in a spreadsheet, hand a list to a caterer, or keep a copy for your own records, the data comes with you. This has been asked for many times, and it's good to have it in properly rather than as a copy-and-paste job.

Your Lodge's colours

Finally, a smaller touch: you can set your Lodge's branding colours for reports, so a printed or exported report looks like it belongs to your Lodge rather than to us.

New reporting for the Almoner

Following on from the Almoner and Welfare work in the last release, the reporting side has had some attention too, all of it kept firmly behind the Almoner / Welfare permission.

Welfare on your own terms

The Welfare Report now has a date range. Rather than a fixed last-twelve-months window, you can review Support & Disbursements over any period you like, with quick buttons for This Year, Last 12 Months, Last 3 Years and All Time, and the totals update to match.

Welfare in the Report Builder

The Report Builder gains an optional Open Welfare Items column, listing each Member's unresolved welfare events. It only appears for those with the Almoner permission, in exactly the same way the Treasurer's financial columns are limited to the Treasurer. And because that information is confidential, scheduling a report that includes it asks you to confirm before it can be emailed anywhere other than to the Lodge owner or an Almoner. If a report's owner later loses the Almoner permission, the welfare columns quietly drop out of their scheduled sends.

Finding your longest-serving Brethren

The Masonic Birthday report now has a sort toggle: as well as the usual view by next Masonic birthday, you can switch to list your longest-serving Brethren first, with a new column showing completed years since Initiation. A quiet help for the Almoner keeping an eye on senior Members, and for any Lodge thinking about long-service recognition.

Also in this release

• Documents into folders. You can now drag your Documents into folders to keep the store tidy, rather than everything sitting in one long list.
• A Guide for Delegates. There's a new, shareable guide written directly to the Brethren you invite as Delegates, covering what they can do, how to accept an invite and set a password, and how to find their way around. You'll find a link to share on the Delegates page, and new Delegates get a gentle welcome note when they first log in. It's meant to take some of the "how do I..." questions off your plate.
• Safer form approvals. Following the new Forms engine, approving a Member's submitted details is now safer: each answer has its own Apply tick showing the current value next to the submitted one, blank answers are left unticked so they can't wipe existing data by accident, and only the fields you tick are written to the record.

Bug fixes & ongoing work

• The Dashboard could throw an error for some Lodges due to a leftover, long-commented-out notice from early last year. That's been removed and the Dashboard loads cleanly again. Fixed.
• Previewing or downloading a Document whose file had gone missing could error rather than failing gracefully. It now returns a clean "not found" instead of crashing. Fixed.
• As ever, if something isn't behaving, the quickest way to reach me is the ticket form at theworkingtools.co.uk/my-tickets.

Documentation

The Reports documentation has been updated for everything above, including the new reports, the Report Builder and the welfare additions, and there's the new Guide for Delegates to share. As always, the documentation is the best first port of call.

What's coming next?

Having made the reports within a Lodge much stronger, the natural next step is across Lodges. For those of you running several units, the provincial view I've mentioned before, a single place to see reports and activity rolled up across all of your Lodges, is the big piece on the workbench. Alongside that I'll keep working through the Feature Board, which continues to shape what gets built.

As always, thank you for supporting The Working Tools. The system continues to grow because of your feedback and real-world use. If you know a Secretary in any Order who might benefit from what we're building, please do point them our way for a free trial.

More soon.

S&F,
Karl