Summary
Custom Reports is built on two catalogs. They're the starting point for everything you'll do here — most of what you'd want to build is already in one of them, so it pays to understand what's inside each.
The Analytics Catalog is the raw material: metrics, facts, and attributes you combine to make a chart.
The Visualizations catalog is your team's shared library of saved charts, KPIs, and tables, ready to drop onto a dashboard.
The Analytics Catalog
The Analytics Catalog lives in the left panel of the Report Designer. Every chart and KPI in Reports is built from items in this catalog — you drag them into the bucket drop zones in the Configuration panel, and the canvas renders the result.
What's inside
The Analytics Catalog has three kinds of items.
Metrics — already-computed numbers
A metric is a formula that's already wired up for you. Drop one into the Metrics bucket and the canvas renders a number, a KPI, or a chart series. Most dashboard tiles only ever need a metric.
Examples from your tenant's catalog:
Load Count
Trip Count
Trips Completed
Total Revenue
Total Carrier Cost
Active Drivers
On-Time Delivery %
On-Time Pickup %
Average Delivery Delay
Margin per Load
Gross Margin %
Loaded Miles
Empty Miles
Facts — raw numeric columns
A fact is the underlying numeric column from your data — the raw value before any formula wraps it. Facts are mainly used inside MAQL formulas, where you wrap them with an aggregation like SUM({fact/...}).
Examples of the kind of thing a fact represents:
The dollar amount on each load
The carrier cost on each load
The mile count on each trip
The late minutes on each trip
The count of stops on a trip
If you're not writing MAQL, you'll rarely touch facts directly. Most users live in metrics and attributes.
Attributes — the "by what" of a question
An attribute is a category — the dimension you slice a number by. "Revenue by customer", "load count by month", "margin by lane".
Drop attributes into the View by, Rows, Columns, or Stack by buckets, or onto the filter bar.
Examples from your tenant's catalog:
Customer
Carrier
Driver
Lane
Subsidiary
Equipment Type
Load Status
Trip Picked Up At (date attribute)
Trip Created At (date attribute)
Trip Delivered At (date attribute)
Load Invoiced At (date attribute)
Date attributes are still attributes, but you can group them by Month, Quarter, Year, etc. using the Group by option on the bucket chip after you drop one in.
How to find what you need
Type a business word in the search box at the top of the Analytics Catalog panel — Revenue, Customer, Lane, On-Time, Margin. The panel filters as you type.
When two items share a similar name (for example Revenue and Total Revenue), prefer the simpler one and let dashboard filters do the slicing.
The Visualizations catalog
💡 Think of a visualization as a widget you drop onto a dashboard — a single chart, KPI tile, table, or map. One question per widget. The Visualizations catalog is your shelf of ready-to-use widgets.
The Visualizations catalog is your team's shared library of finished charts — KPIs, trends, tables, breakdowns — that someone has already built and saved.
It's separate from the Analytics Catalog: instead of raw building blocks, it contains complete visualizations you drop straight onto a dashboard.
You'll meet it in two places:
Left panel of the Dashboard editor — when you're assembling a dashboard, search here and drag finished tiles onto the grid.
The Designer's Open dialog — when you want to load and tweak an existing visualization rather than build a new one.
What's inside
Your tenant ships with a rich library of Alvys-curated visualizations covering the questions most teams ask. A sample from your catalog:
Total Revenue
Total Revenue Trend
Total Carrier Cost
Load Count Trend
Trips Completed
On-Time Delivery %
On-Time Pickup % Trend
Top 10 Customers by Revenue
Top 15 Lanes by Margin %
Top 15 Lanes by Total Gross Margin
Revenue by Equipment Type
Margin Heat Map
Margin per Load Trend
Profitability vs Volume
Loaded vs Empty Miles — Weekly Trend
Stop Dwell Time Distribution
Late Trips Today
Negative Margin Loads
When someone on your team saves a new visualization, it lands in this catalog and becomes available to everyone with Reporting Access on your tenant.
How to find what you need
Type a business word in the search box at the top of the panel. Search for what you're trying to show, not what the underlying data field is called:
"Revenue" finds revenue tiles and trends
"On-Time" finds OTD and OTP variants
"Customer" finds customer breakdowns
"Margin" finds margin heat maps and trends
"Top" finds the Top-N tables and bar charts
⚠️ Name new visualizations clearly. When you save a visualization, it lands in the Visualizations catalog for everyone on your tenant. A clear, business-word name — "Revenue YoY % by Customer" — is much easier for your teammates to discover than a code-style name like "rev_yoy_pct".
Where to go next
Build your first dashboard from the catalog: Get started with Custom Reports.
Customize an existing visualization with drag-and-drop: Build visualizations with drag-and-drop.
Need a metric the catalog doesn't have? (Advanced) Advanced — write custom metrics with MAQL.
Share, export, schedule, or alert: Share, export, schedule, alert.