External reporting

Reporting within CiviCRM generally assumes that:

• You want to report directly on your "production" CiviCRM database with real-time data.
• You only want to report on data in CiviCRM, rather than data from other applications or combined data from many applications.

You can also create reports, dashboards, or data transformations outside CiviCRM using tools such as Metabase, Tableau, Power BI, RapidMiner, and Pentaho. These tools can access the CiviCRM database through a direct link to the MySQL or Maria database, or potentially through the CiviCRM API.

How to use these tools is outside the scope of this document. If your organization does not have the necessary skills, contact your CiviCRM experts or whoever supports you with CiviCRM or reporting.