About this lab#

This is a guided course, not a reference. You start with an empty Windows server, install Reportworq, and finish with a working reporting system that emails a board pack to the people who need it. Every lab is a task you actually perform, in order, with the reason for each step alongside the step itself.

The worked example throughout is Timberline Harvest Co., Reportworq's own demo company. Its workbooks, planning model, and reports are the material you build with, so the reports you produce are the reports a real finance team would recognize, not toy examples. See the Timberline Demo System guide for what the company is and what is in it.

Who this is for#

Anyone standing Reportworq up for the first time, on their own server or a trial one: the administrator who installs it, and the report author who then builds on it. The labs assume you know Excel well and your planning system reasonably well. They assume nothing about Reportworq.

If you already have a running server and only want to look at what Reportworq can do, the Timberline guide is the faster route. Come here when you want to build it yourself and understand why each piece is set the way it is.

How every lab reads#

The labs share one shape, so you always know where you are:

Install, setup and navigation labs use Parts A to C for the stages of the task rather than for a workbook, but the rest of the shape holds.

The labs#

Work through them in order. Each one assumes the one before it.

What each of the remaining labs covers#

Labs 4 to 10 build real Timberline jobs, and they are ordered so that every lab adds exactly one idea to the one before it. Where a lab builds a whole job, the finished version is already sitting in Timberline ▸ Financial Reports as the answer key; you build yours beside it, in a Hands on Lab folder that Lab 4 creates, from your own copy of the source files.

Lab 4: Your first report. You build your own copy of Financial Statements, in a Hands on Lab folder of your own: income statement, balance sheet and cash flow, one output per market. This is the simplest shape in the product, a source workbook plus a job, and it is where you learn the parts every later lab reuses: attaching a source file, picking the worksheets, setting one burst parameter (Market), taking a second value from the Current Year global parameter, and producing Excel and PDF. One parameter, one file per market, nothing clever.

Lab 5: A sheet per value. You take a copy of the report you built in Lab 4 and make its worksheets repeat inside each market's pack. Year becomes a list of two years set to one page per item, so each pack carries every statement once per year, and the sheet names you practiced in Lab 4 gain the year so the copies can be told apart. You map the parameters on each tab that repeats, see why a parameter with several values in one file stays out of the file name and the subject, and try Group & collate to see the pages arranged by year instead of by worksheet, with a PDF bookmark heading per year. Still one file per market; now with more than one page per thing inside it.

Lab 6: Burst sets, and parameters that are not on a worksheet. This lab is mostly about burst sets. Turning a parameter on for burst sets switches on the Bursting step, where each row is its own output and can carry its own values, which is the tool for the day the outputs are not all built the same way. Then, since until now every parameter has been written into a cell, the lab uses one only for reference in the email, mapped to no tab at all.

Lab 7: One deck, a section per division. You build Board Packet with Division Slides, which adds two things. First, PowerPoint: the deck is built from a template whose slides are linked back to named ranges and charts in the workbook, so nobody ever edits PowerPoint by hand. Second, one page per item doing the same job in a deck: the pack stays at total-company level and the sales revenue slide repeats once per division, so you get one deck with a section per division rather than a deck per division.

Lab 8: A file per division. You build Divisional Packet, the counterpart to Lab 7 and the reason the two sit next to each other. This job takes the other replication option: it runs per region, and then repeats each market inside the pack it produces. Both parameters are MDX and the second depends on the first, so nothing is hard-coded and adding a region to the planning model simply produces another pack. Read next to Lab 7, this is the fastest way to understand "a page per thing" against "a file per thing".

Lab 9: An email people actually read. You go back to the Lab 7 job and build the other half of it, the email body: a greeting pulled from the workbook, a scaled screenshot of the KPI band, and the summary P&L rendered as a live HTML table rather than an attachment nobody opens. This is where the Address Book and its custom fields start to matter, and where the Email Inbox earns its keep, because you can run the job and read exactly what would have been sent.

Lab 10: Depth and AI commentary. You build Timberline Sales Information, the deepest job in the store. Four parameters: Market produces one report each, while Channel and Product each produce a page, so a single template yields a tab per channel and a tab per product, with the tab names built from the values and empty rows suppressing themselves. It carries an AI Context worksheet and a full AI profile, so its email body contains a generated commentary paragraph instead of a static message.

Lab 11: Put it on a schedule. Nothing new is built. You take the jobs you now have, put them on schedules, and learn what the Scheduled Content and Activity screens are actually for: the per-schedule toggle against the instance-wide Scheduler running switch, holding a delivery, and reading a run's history after the fact, including one that failed on purpose.

Not covered by the course. Two things in that folder are there as further examples rather than as labs: the Sales Rep Scorecard (a cascading manager-then-rep burst, PDF only) and the Segment & Channel Budget Input contribution campaign. Open them once you have finished Lab 11 if you want to see where the ideas go next.

How this fits with the other guides#

The labs are deliberately narrow. They walk one correct path and explain it. When you need the full picture, the other guides carry it:

• Administrator Guide is the complete install reference, including Linux, containers, and every option the labs skip.
• User Guide is the reference for reports, parameters, bursting, distribution and scheduling.
• Timberline Demo System describes the finished reports the labs build toward.

Going deeper. Each lab ends with its own links into those guides, at the exact point where you have just done the thing they describe.