The short answer is YES, we can group together and therefore report on date periods, however, what is sometimes required is a way to group these periods together that do not follow a traditional date range, such as "same year - 2008, 2009, 2010" etc..

The obvious exception to the normal date reporting is when you are wanting to report on Financial Periods that cross over years. Perhaps your Financial Year starts on the 1st April and ends on the 31st March. This is traditionally less easy to report on as a trend.

OpenCRM allows you to report on periods based within the current Financial Year, however, if you wanted to show a 'Year on Year trend graph' that shows a number of financial periods, normal date reporting will not work. In my example I want to display a graph that shows the last 5 years turnover as a trend. To achieve this you would follow these steps;

• Create a Custom Field (Financial Year) and add this to the entity that you are wanting to report on - in this case we will use Invoices.
• Make this custom field a PICKLIST
• In my example the values are : 2005 - 2006, 2006 - 2007, 2007 - 2008, 2008 - 2009, 2009 - 2010, 2010 - 2011
• Set the top value in the PICKLIST to be the current Financial Year (because this is set as the top value this will become the default entry when you create any new Invoice, therefore allowing the data collection to be automated - NOTE : you will need to add the new financial year values to the top of the field at the start of your next financial year).
• To set the values on existing Invoices - create a Custom View OR use the search options to list all of the Invoices in a given date range, then globally update the Invoices with the relevant values from the list.
• When you have the Invoices set with the correct Financial Year data you can create a report that displays a Graph based on the Financial Year custom field, you can group the report on the Financial Year field which will produce a graph of the yearly totals.

Consider using a Line Style to show trends.

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