What Is the Reports Screen?
The Reports screen is Orbital’s comprehensive analytics dashboard that provides detailed insights into your task management system. It displays key metrics, task distributions, and usage patterns to help administrators understand how their team is using Orbital and identify areas for optimization.
The Reports screen is exclusively available to WordPress administrators and provides both high-level summary data and detailed breakdowns of various aspects of your task management workflow.
Why Use the Reports Screen?
The Reports screen helps you:
- Monitor team productivity by tracking task completion rates and user activity
- Identify workflow bottlenecks through due date analysis and approval workflow reports
- Optimize task organization with category and priority distribution insights
- Ensure system health by identifying orphaned data and permission usage patterns
- Make data-driven decisions about task management processes and team assignments
Understanding these metrics can significantly improve your team’s efficiency and help you spot issues before they become problems.
How to Access the Reports Screen
To access the Reports screen:
- Navigate to your WordPress admin dashboard
- Look for the Orbital menu in the left sidebar
- Click on Reports in the submenu
Note: The Reports menu is only visible to WordPress administrators (users with the manage_options capability).
Screenshot: Show the WordPress admin menu with Orbital expanded and Reports highlighted
Understanding the Analytics Dashboard
When you first access the Reports screen, you’ll see three key summary cards at the top:
Quick Stats Overview
- Open Tasks: Shows the total number of active tasks in your system
- Unapproved Tasks: Displays tasks that are pending approval in your workflow
- Overdue Tasks: Highlights tasks that have passed their due date (shown with a warning style)
These summary cards provide an immediate snapshot of your system’s current state and help you quickly identify urgent items that need attention.
Screenshot: Show the three analytics cards at the top of the Reports screen
Available Report Types
Select any report from the dropdown menu and click “Generate Report” to view detailed analysis. Here are the available reports:
Task Status Overview
Provides a comprehensive breakdown of all tasks by their current status (Published, Draft, Pending Review, Private, Trash). This report shows both counts and percentages, helping you understand your team’s workflow patterns and identify tasks that may be stuck in certain statuses.
Priority Distribution
Analyzes how tasks are distributed across different priority levels (High, Medium, Low, Not Set). This report helps you understand your team’s prioritization habits and identify if too many tasks are marked as high priority, which can dilute the effectiveness of the priority system.
Due Date Analysis
Shows task distribution across time periods: overdue, due today, due this week, due this month, and future tasks. This temporal analysis helps identify workload distribution and planning effectiveness, highlighting potential deadline management issues.
Tasks with Missing Dates
Identifies tasks that lack important date information, which can impact planning and deadline management. This report helps maintain data quality by highlighting tasks that need additional date information to be properly managed.
Approval Workflow
Analyzes the approval workflow status across your tasks, showing how many tasks are at different stages of the approval process. This report helps identify bottlenecks in your approval workflow and ensures tasks aren’t getting stuck in review.
User Activity
Provides detailed statistics about user engagement with the task system, including total tasks per user, status breakdowns for each user’s tasks, and last activity timestamps. This report helps identify power users, inactive team members, and individual productivity patterns.
Category Breakdown
Shows how tasks are distributed across different categories, helping you understand which types of work are most common and whether your category structure is being used effectively by your team.
Permission Usage
Analyzes how the permission override system is being utilized, showing total overrides and which users have custom permissions. This report helps administrators understand permission complexity and identify users with special access requirements.
User Permission Overrides
Provides detailed information about specific permission overrides that have been granted to individual users, helping administrators audit and manage custom permissions across the system.
Posts with Tasks
Shows which posts and pages have tasks attached to them, providing insight into how content and task management intersect in your workflow. This report includes both parent tasks and subtasks attached to content.
Orphaned Custom Fields
Identifies custom field data that may be orphaned or inconsistent, helping maintain system integrity and data quality. This technical report helps administrators clean up unused data and optimize system performance.
Using Reports Effectively
Best Practices
- Regular Review: Check reports weekly or monthly to maintain oversight of your task management system
- Focus on Trends: Look for patterns over time rather than just current snapshots
- Address Issues Early: Use reports to identify and resolve bottlenecks before they impact productivity
- Team Communication: Share relevant insights from reports with your team to improve workflows
Report Selection Tips
- Start with Task Status Overview for a general health check
- Use Due Date Analysis for deadline management and planning
- Review User Activity to understand team engagement and workload distribution
- Check Orphaned Custom Fields periodically for system maintenance
Each report provides both summary statistics and detailed breakdowns, making it easy to get both high-level insights and drill down into specific issues when needed.