HaloPSA Q&A – Ticket Reports

hi everyone and welcome to um another installment in our Q&A series on Halo uh today with me again I have my all-time favorite person at at Halo um Mr Halo himself um and I know that I haven't said this for a little while so I know that he's um he been scratching his own head um because uh uh no one's scratching it for him so um Morgan how how are you doing so yeah very well it's good to be back uh and and to to hear the praise once again absolutely I mean I I literally go you know anywhere I go where I speak about Halo people know Mr Halo so um yeah it's I like it your your reputation procedure you mate So today we're going to talk about um you know generating ticket PDFs um you know printing reports via ticket actions those kind of things I think there's a um the these questions come up quite a lot and we thought this would be a good one to to a video on so yes absolutely and this the topic for this sort of stemmed from uh the conversation that Chris you are having with uh an MSP that's using Halo but this is something that I've come across in the past before uh for various different reasons uh doing things like uh creating change orders um returning not a quote but a document um from from the ticket so yeah as as Chris mentions we'll be covering how to print or how to generate the ticket PDF directly from a ticket directly from an action and then also how to do that with a report so yeah without further Ado and and sorry I was gonna say I mean in this particular use Cas it's you know they they kind of print out all the details on the ticket to to take to their engineer you know give to their engineers and it's um uh you know instead of cuz sometimes their engineer doesn't either have a tablet with them or doesn't have access to to their computer or anything like that um so they like to give them a a physical print out of this is the ticket details you know take this on site and fill in your time manually and we'll do it when you get back and you're very old school but it's it's it's kind of you know still I see that still in practice quite a lot today so um so yeah there's a lot of use cases for this cool so we'll start off just by talking about generating PDFs from tickets so if we go into a ticket just Place start y we'll see we've got uh a an option at the top right in our additional options to print ticket here clicking that will generate uh a PDF based on the information for the ticket in question now this template that we're looking at here is the same mechanism for all of the PDF uh documents PDF templates that we have in Halo uh and configured either via the the dragon drop editor or directly via HTML and you can find those templates in config documents against our tickets entity very similar screen here to like our quote templates right invoice templates for example we've got the pages tab we've got our HTML um that presents the formatting in question now we also have the ability on a ticket type by ticket type basis to set the PDF template that is used so in config tickets ticket types I think in our defaults template uh cool and this uh this raises another point that that Chris and I were talking about two minutes before before we hopped on the session um you'll notice how I went to the place that I thought it was in but it's no longer there and you'll notice that it's now in the settings tab little point to watch out for we have as we've been adding more and more configuration options to our ticket types it's got to a point where uh we needed to create more tabs so uh I as I think as of the latest beta um you'll find the tabs have been more split out so if you're looking for an option that you could have sworn was in details but it's no longer there just bear in mind that we've got the forms tab now and we've got the settings tab as well and that completely through me and and I I I wasn't just I could have sworn that this was there I was actually swearing at Halo no I'm kidding I was like where have they actually moved this stuff too and um so yeah it it completely threw me and I know completely threw Morgan um the first time S as well so um yeah so that's where it's moved to yeah um and so now in the settings tab we have uh the option here to set the PDF template for our tickets that we've got in there and that will determine the the PDF template that is used when generating the PDF for our tickets based on the tickets type that's one way of doing it uh one too many clicks I suppose having to go firstly having to remember to go to the free dots then having to to click that option to generate the PDF you might actually want to speed that process up a little bit and uh have an action uh at the top of your tickets that generates the PDF for you and you can do that by creating an action uh and specifically under the details the action under report settings selecting the template that you want in here so by default I think it's just no so it's not going to generate the PDF template but then if you pick a template you'll then find that performing the action attaches that PDF that ticket PDF now at that point you uh you could either just make this action a quick action and the outcome would be something that looks like this on your action you sorry on your ticket you've got your action print PDF click that and we can see that performing that action is attached our PDF just like so and I suppose you could take that a step further as well uh and have that action email the end user so it might be that you actually want to email this report directly to the user from the action so again you could set up your action to email the end user or email someone um and it would include that as an attachment now you'll also see if we go back to the configuration of that action we have here uh this run report so you can attach the ticket PDF but you might instead actually want to attach a report Associated to ticket billable hours perhaps uh or or something similar to that if you wanted to do that in this dropdown you just pick the report that it is that you want to run and you'll see when you select the report uh you've got a few options as to what to attach do you want to attach the report PDF you want to attach it as a CSV or perhaps just attach the raw Json and furthermore you can see there's a little note below that mentions that you can also use dollar report data or dollar report Json to um to return the contents of that report in the note for the action so you could also go to your defaults Tab and in your default note set that uh dollar report data and then I'm guessing it doesn't have anything on here at the minute um because the report is empty but yeah you can see that's attached to ticket PDF and attached the report so you can get quite creative with these so I've worked with someone in the past who wanted to dynamically update values against user records in Halo uh based on details of the ticket in question and we kind of found a solution by creating a report for the ticket generating the Json for that report port and then using that Json in a custom integration runbook uh to dynamically update those values so you can you can get quite creative with how you you go about that um how you go about using that another example is uh someone wanted a basic RMA uh sheet to to send to a given address and uh that sheet they wanted the contents of that sheet to be based on fields that we add to the ticket so the device you know is it a repair replacement uh if it's a if it's a repair what's broken with it when's the date who signed it off that kind of stuff um which we can add as fields on the ticket and then we can use those fields in a ticket PDF and attach that PDF so uh if you're ever thinking about uh does Halo generate this certain type of document for me uh and if the answer is not no it's not native you can always come back to the the fact that you can actually construct your own documents based on the fields that you have on your ticket uh and a little bit of HTML wizard read to to format that as a page and then return the associated PDF so yeah um I think Morgan that might be a good a good video to do actually at some point I think for for us to to do maybe after this Q&A ser or or even as part of it is is actually go through that in detail you know how would we add some uh some custom fields to a ticket and then say you know here's a PDF with all that information that could be you know what could be really good with that it could be kind of almost like a um a customer onboarding or new user on boarding thing right where it's hey you know welcome welcome to the company here's here's a list of all your you know here's your login here's your temporary password you know um all these things you might want to send that as a PDF to somebody to go here's all the details that you might need so they can p it on their W whatever they want but yeah all right drop that down we'll uh we'll we'll do that in in a couple of weeks time we'll do a nice start to end the whole shebang build a ticket type build Uh custom Fields build a template format the template using the custom Fields put in a workflow maybe put a Chuck and approval in there somewhere um and then send that to an address as also um another Point not very well known sort of adjacent to this fact is in your actions in the defaults tab for an action you can override who you're sending the email to uh by populating the two address override here and this can actually be a custom field so we'll um and not only a custom field at ticket level but a custom field at client level so it might be that we have and again this touches on a point that I've discussed with another one of our customers recently uh where they have subsets of users per customer who who need to receive uh a certain report for based on a change request or uh you know based on on a vulnerability assessment or something like that um they need they need to receive some formatted document the individuals are specific to the customer uh obviously they they wanted to automate as much as possible so we have custom fields at customer level and an action that sends an email to those users based on the customer so uh yeah when we do that that start to end we'll make sure we Chuck that in there as well handy little points that I think that would be really cool um yeah and I've used that default to and and NCC a couple of times um on on that ticket as well so yeah I think it's there's so many of these little handy things I think a lot of people don't use because they don't know about them but um hopefully through this video series we'll kind of try and address a lot of these you know little things that people may not know about so yeah well like we said we've we've done our basic implementation now people should understand what ticket types and workflows and actions and billing plan combinations are uh now we're getting into the nitty-gritty and having a look at some of the cool ways that uh you know Halo becomes uh really powerful with with the these little tweaks so yeah yeah yeah okay I think I think we'll leave it at that yeah yeah exactly I think let's make this a nice short one um good um good video to do so once again always um as always Morgan thank you so much for your time uh thank you for Halo to Halo for letting us borrow you and do these videos they really are getting a huge amount of attaction so I think you know everyone's loving them um and if nothing else you're getting a good um a good kind of reputation out there as Mr Halo right so nothing else um everyone else is going to start calling you that from now on as well um so thanks very that's why I do it that's the real reason why I do the only reason right it's nothing to do with me or anyone else it's just that's the exactly um so thank you so much really appreciate it and uh look forward to seeing you on the next video yeah always a pleasure and see you on the next one see you on the next one