Reporting Publisher
Overview
Report Publisher allows your school to publish PDF reports to Compass. These reports will show on the Reports tab of a student's profile and can be set to be visible to either staff, students, parents, or any combination thereof.
This module is typically used to upload reports for schools using a third-party report writing program (e.g. Accelerus, ReporterPro, etc...).
It can also be used to upload reports from previous years that the school has on file which allows Compass to be the central repository of reports for parents, students and staff access.
Publishing reports on Compass rather than printing them and sending them home saves the school the cost of printing, as well as provides an incentive to parents to login to Compass, where they can see news items, approve absences, and further engage with the school.
Permissions
To be able to upload and publish PDF reports, you will require the ReportsAdmin permission.
This is a default permission of the CompassSponsors, CompassLearningLeaders, CompassPrincipals, CompassDailyOrg, and CompassBusinessManagers permission role groups.
If you require this permission, please speak with your school's Compass Sponsor or school IT technician.
For further information on permissions in Compass, please refer to our Permissions Knowledge Base article.
Correct Format for Report Files
Prior to uploading, please ensure your Report files meet the following conditions:
- The Reports you want to upload must be in PDF format.
- The file name must be either the student's username, import identifier, GovCode1 or GovCode2, i.e DAV0001.pdf (in most cases, this will be the student's SIS Id).
Note: For Government VIC schools this is their CASES code, for Catholic schools, this will be their SAS code (you will specify the identifier type when uploading reports).
Government WA schools will need to use GovtCode2 which will be the student's SCSA number.
- Each student's individual report file cannot exceed 5MB.
- Reports must be correctly rotated.
- A student's report file must contain all pages of the individual student's report. For each reporting cycle, there can only be one PDF file per student, multiple PDF files for the same student in one reporting cycle are not supported.
To find a student's import identifier, navigate to the student's profile page via search, click their personal tab and it will be the value in "Student ID"
Creating a Report Publisher Cycle
Navigate to the Teaching & Learning menu (pencil icon) and click 'Semester Reports'. You will need to create a new Report Publisher cycle, which you can do by clicking '+ Add New Cycle' and filling in your desired cycle details.
Be sure to select the correct year and semester, give the cycle a name and choose 'PDF Publisher Cycle' from the Cycle Type section at the bottom.
If you make a mistake on the name of the cycle you can edit it later, but all other settings chosen in this window cannot be changed - if you do make a mistake simply delete the cycle and create another.
Click 'Create Cycle' when you are certain you've chosen the correct settings.
Once created, you will be able to distinguish between your newly created Reports Publisher cycle and any pre-existing Reports Writer cycles by referring to the "Type" column.
How to Upload your Reports
On the screen with all of your reporting cycles listed, locate the cycle you want to upload reports to and click the corresponding 'Upload Reports' icon.
Clicking this will display the following pop-up.
Select the applicable Identifier for your files from the list of options. Drag and drop the report files into the pop-up.
Compass will then import the reports against the applicable student by matching the file name identifier i.e Compass/SUSSI/LDAP code or GovCode1/GovCode2 (VSN/CEIDER/QCE).
As the files upload you will see the top progress bar fill up and a count overview indicating how many have succeeded, are pending, and have failed.
Important - do not click 'Close' on this window during this time, as it will stop the upload process.Once all the files have uploaded, you will see 'Upload Complete' in the progress bar at the top. All files that were successfully uploaded will have a green tick next to them. If a file cannot be matched by the selected Identifier, or it matches multiple students, the upload of the file will fail and it will list as failed with the reason why. Please refer to the below 'Troubleshooting' section in this article if this occurs.
Once your reports have finished uploading, they will be ready to be published to your parent, student and/or staff community.
Please Note: If you had already uploaded a report for a student in this publisher cycle, any further reports uploaded into that same cycle for the student will overwrite their existing file. If you need to completely remove a report for a particular student from the cycle, staff with the ReportsAdmin permission can do so by going to that student's profile page, clicking to their 'Reports' tab. Locate the particular report from the list and click the associated red 'x' icon for that report (only reports that are contained within a Publisher Cycle for the student will have the option to delete showing).Publishing Your Reports
When a reporting cycle is created, by default, it is initially set as not visible to Staff, Students or Parents.
You can check the cycle's visibility settings as well as publish the reports on the Semester Reports page.
To access this, navigate to the Teaching & Learning menu (pencil icon) and click 'Semester Reports'. Locate the cycle you want to view/edit in the list and click the associated edit pencil icon.
In this pop-up window you can edit the title of your reporting cycle and release reports to specific audiences (Staff, Parents, Students) at differing times, as well as publish to specified year levels, or parents of different year levels, on separate occasions.
You will see three columns referring to visibility of the reports - Staff Access, Student Access, and Parent Access. Tick the appropriate check boxes for the applicable audience you want to publish the reports to and click 'Save Cycle'.
If you need to remove the audience visibility, simply untick the box/boxes relating to the user(s) you do not want visibility enabled for and click 'Save Cycle' to update.
Uploading PDFs to Report Writer Cycles
If your school uses the Compass Report Writer module you can still utilise manually uploaded PDFs.
Schools with both of these reporting modules commonly use these functions in tandem to upload PDF reports for a small group of students who are graded differently from the rest of the school.
Alternative reports can be set up to be written in Compass, but for schools that want to continue with their previous processes this allows the reports to be attached to the same cycle as the other students, without having been written in Compass.
Please note that in order for a PDF to be successfully uploaded to a Reports Writer cycle, the student(s) you are wishing to upload a report PDF for, will need to be enrolled in the relevant reporting cycle. To check this, go the Enrolments tab of this Writer cycle and ensure that the students whose PDFs you want to upload are listed. If not, click "Add Enrolment(s) and follow the pop up window prompts to add the student(s) to the cycle.
Please keep in mind that if the student needs to get reports for some of their subjects from the Report Writer cycle, and some of their subjects from the PDF report to be uploaded, then you cannot use the method described here - you will need to put the the PDF file on a different cycle. Students can only ever have one file associated with their account for each reporting cycle.
Troubleshooting
Invalid File
If you receive an Invalid File error (image below) this indicates that you are attempting to upload the wrong type of file. To resolve this, check the following:
- That what was dragged/dropped into the Upload field was the PDFs themselves, not the folder containing the PDFs.
- Only files ending with .pdf are selected. The system will throw this error if you attempt to import any other file type (e.g. .doc, .jpg, .png, etc..)
Failed Uploads
If there are any files in the upload that are unable to match with a student in your school portal, the file matches with multiple users or the relevant students are not enrolled within the corresponding reporting cycle (Report Writer cycles only), these PDFs will fail to upload. This will be indicated with a 'User not found or not enrolled in report cycle' or 'Filename matches more than one student' message in the Details column.
This circumstance can be resolved by ensuring the student:
1) Is enrolled in the relevant Reports Writer cycle (applicable only when uploading to a Reports Writer cycle)
AND/OR
2) Has an existing user record in your school portal
3) Has a unique identifier
Uploading Reports Without ReportsAdmin Permission
For users who do not have the ReportsAdmin permission, which is necessary to perform the steps listed above, access to the Administration Tools section of Compass, will enable the user to upload individual reports on an ad-hoc basis.
This process can be completed via the 'Upload Individual Student Report' page, which is made available by navigating to the Tools Menu (cog icon) then Administration Tools. This functionality can be utilised to upload an additional report for a student or an updated file.
From the Upload Individual Student Report page select the student, and reporting cycle and upload the file.
Please be advised that this will overwrite any existing report for the student in this reporting cycle and will appear on the student's profile once uploaded successfully.
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