Understanding how and when reports get updated with the latest data is important to ensure you have the most accurate information at your fingertips.

The latest financial data in your accounting system (Xero, MYOB, QBO) comes through to XBert via a process called Sync. This usually happens several times a day, for all audit clients - those clients in XBert that have an accounting system integration.

After the latest financial data is in XBert, among other things, the sync process then updates the data that will ultimately be used by the reports. This data includes non-financial data, i.e. what XBert creates - for example, when you log time against a task in XBert (This is not data that comes from Xero, MYOB, or QBO. It is data that is generated within XBert).

Every hour, the dataset that drives each report refreshes itself. It does this independently of sync. That means a report will refresh with whatever the latest data is available at the time of refresh.

Each report has its own dataset. Datasets refresh at a semi-random time, every hour. They do not refresh on the hour, every hour. It could be 12:33 pm then 1:28 pm, for example. Another report might refresh closer to the hour, say 12:01 pm and 1:03 pm.

Not all reports refresh their datasets at the same time.

So, the sync process creates all the latest data ready for reporting to use, and the report refresh process pushes all this data into the actual datasets that the reports use, therefore making the reports up to date.

Note: Keep in mind that the timing of the report refresh and the timing of sync will ultimately determine, per client, how up-to-date they are.

Clients that are in XBert for workflow-only purposes - that is, they do not have an accounting system integration with XBert - are called workflow-only clients and they have their own sync, which happens every 6 hours.

See workflow-only clients for more info on this type of client.

There's no financial data to sync for workflow clients, however, the non-financial data (such as who completed what tasks, and which clients have been moved to which groups), is all processed the same way as it is for audit clients.

The report refresh process doesn't care whether the data is for an audit or workflow-only client. Whatever data is available when a refresh starts is what it pushes into the datasets used by the report.

You're working in Xero and adding several new invoices for a client. A report refresh happens 35 minutes later. XBert does not have this new financial data and no reports will have these new invoices in them either.

Sync happens 3 hours later - the invoices are now in XBert, and among other things, they are analysed for potential issues. Let's say XBert finds one issue, a potential wrong account used on an invoice line in one of the invoices. The reporting data, including that for the new invoices and the new data quality issue, is now also created.

However, the reports do not have the new invoices (for example in the activity count report) nor would the (data quality) report have the details of the wrong account code issue.

Report refresh for the Activity Count report happens 25 minutes later. This report is now up to date with the above-mentioned invoice data. Then 8 minutes later, a report refresh for the Data Quality report happens - and this report is now up to date also.

You're working in XBert and log then commit some time against several tasks, for some workflow-only clients. 6 hours later, the sync happens and the new reporting data with the committed time is created.

An hour after this, the report refresh happens for the Actual Time report and it is now up to date. It took about 7 hours to see your committed time show up in reports.

Conversely, in the above example, the sync could happen 5 mins after you committed the time and the Actual Time report refresh 3 mins after that, in which case it was about 8 mins between logging the time in XBert and seeing the results show up in the report.

There can be significant time lag between when you update data, either in your accounting system or within XBert, and when you see that data take effect in reports. However, it is not always a significant time lag, and in some cases, it may only be a matter of minutes.