Period summaries

A period summary takes one form and shows it in its own layout, read-only, with every cell holding an aggregate across every entry filed in a period.

Thirty daily shift sheets become one shift sheet whose cells hold the month.

Opening one

Open the form's entries under Submissions and choose Period summary in the list's header. The Period Summary page opens on the most recent month that has submissions. If the month you were looking at has none, a note says so: No submissions in … — showing ….

To change the period, press the period button (Choose a different period) and pick a range; the summary rebuilds.

To summarise only some entries, select or filter rows in the submissions table and use Summarise these submissions. The totals and averages cover exactly those rows.

What appears on it

Only the fields marked Show in summary in the form builder appear. A form with none marked says Nothing on this form is marked to show in the summary: edit the form and tick Show in summary on the fields worth reporting on.

Drafts are not included. Meter readings never appear: a reading is a figure at a point in time, so a period has no total for it. It stays on each entry.

What each cell holds

The aggregate depends on what the field is:

Field	Aggregated as
A figure that builds up	Totalled across the period.
A figure marked as not total-able (a rate, a ratio)	Averaged.
A computed field	The results already worked out on each entry, totalled (or averaged, when it is marked not total-able).
A choice from a list	The answer given most often.
Text, or a reference to another document	The distinct values.
A date or a time	The earliest and the latest.
A signature	How many entries were signed.

Against the plan

Where a field has a plan, the cell carries a Plan for this period (or Plan per value for an averaged field) and the variance beside the figure, with the same green/red standing it has on the form itself.

Each value is held to the plan that was in force on its own date, so a plan you changed part-way through the month counts at its old figure for the days before the change and its new figure after. A field with no plan history uses its current plan for every value.

An open entry on a field linked to a parameter planned by period shows that period's plan under its running figure, and the figure travels into the exported documents beside it.

Rows

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why some sections show a row per item and others show a single combined row.

A repeating section linked to a tracker group has stable row identity. Row Truck 4 means the same truck on every entry, so the summary gives it a row of its own. Where an item was recorded on only some of the period's entries, the cell shows how many, 18/30, and its tooltip reads Recorded on 18 of 30 submissions in this period.

Everything else collapses to a single row. In an unlinked repeating section, "row 3" is whatever happened to be typed third that day, and is a different thing each time. There is no honest way to line those up across thirty entries, so they are aggregated together, and an icon on the section explains why.

Combined rows show no coverage fraction

A linked row can say "recorded on 18 of 30" because the number of entries it could have appeared on is known. A combined row cannot, so it shows how many values it carried instead of a fraction.

A section with many parameters reads better turned on its side: Rotate puts the items across the top and the parameters down the side.

Shifts

On a form filled in per shift, choose Combined to fold every shift into one figure per field, or By shift to see the shifts side by side with their total.

It reads the form, not the parameter engine

A period summary aggregates what the form recorded, which is not the same set of figures as the dashboard shows.

The dashboard reads published readings, and a field only publishes one if it is linked to a monitored parameter and sits in a section linked to a tracker group. Most of a typical form writes nothing there: form-only fields, computed fields and signatures never do.

So the two can legitimately disagree in scope: the summary shows what the form captured, the dashboard shows what became a reading.

Getting it out

The card header carries Reading mode, Export to Excel, Export to PDF, Print on letterhead and Share via chat or email. The exported subtitle reads the period, the number of submissions and Period summary, so a printed page cannot be mistaken for a different period's. See Taking data away.