Concepts¶
The ideas the rest of the documentation assumes.
Workspace¶
A workspace holds one company: its profile, users, bexio connection, configuration, report data, logs and billing. Almost everything is company-owned — switching workspace means working with a different set of data entirely.
bexio connection¶
mReport reads projects, work packages, contacts, users and time entries from bexio. The connection lives under bexio access and is used by background sync jobs.
It is read-only. mReport never writes to bexio, so a wrong number is always fixed in bexio and then synced.
Base data¶
Reusable information every report draws on:
- contacts
- client services
- holidays
- employee time rules
- chart colors
- disclaimers
- bexio projects and work packages
Changing base data changes how dashboards and PDFs are grouped, labelled and calculated — often across several reports at once.
Estimates¶
An estimate is the hours planned for one bexio work package. mReport reads them; it never writes them, so an estimate is corrected in bexio and then synced.
They are what the project report measures booked hours against, and what the work report can draw its budget from.
An estimate can also be absent, which is not the same as an estimate of zero. Zero says the work was planned to take no time; absent says nobody planned it. A report that finds no estimates on a project says so and shows hours only, rather than reporting every project as infinitely over its plan.
Report configuration¶
A reusable preset: what can be reported, not the data of one refresh. One configuration serves every period, so you do not create a new one per month. See report configurations.
Report data¶
The generated result for one time window. Dashboards read this from the database instead of querying bexio on every page load — which is why a report opens instantly.
A report refreshes by itself when you open it and what it shows is out of date: its configuration changed, the time entries it reads changed in bexio, or the period has never been computed. A banner shows while that runs and disappears when the new figures are in. A sync that brings nothing new for a report leaves it as it is.
The sync button on a report fetches from bexio straight away, without waiting for that.
Background jobs¶
Syncs, refreshes and large PDF exports run as background jobs. You can navigate away; the page updates itself when the job finishes. A job that fails leaves an entry in the error log, and a report whose refresh failed says so in a line above its figures. It tries once more by itself, then waits for you to start it again.