Major Enhancements to our CSV Reports: 90% Faster and More!
by Claire Lee
EasyPost offers a best-in-class and robust suite of shipping APIs including address verification, purchasing labels, tracking shipments, parcel insurance, and more. Many elect to look no further than EasyPost for all of their shipping needs, but managing all of these critical components to our customer's shipping programs means our reporting capabilities need to be incredibly flexible and easy to use.
For this reason, we recently completed several key improvements to EasyPost's reporting capabilities so users can pull any data they need in seconds. The enhancements improve the customizability of reports, add new metrics, and significantly decrease processing speeds - up to 90%.
These new reporting enhancements followed closely after our recently launched analytics dashboard that help users seamlessly pick out anomalies and trends with their shipping program (read more on our analytics dashboard).
Reporting features overview
Reports can be downloaded directly from our dashboard or pulled from our reporting API. Downloading reports directly within the EasyPost dashboard helps answer questions quickly and doesn't require technical resources. The reporting API is useful for more sophisticated reporting needs and for building a process to pull reports regularly.
Billing reports
We support several types of financial reports including payment logs, cash flow, shipment invoices, and shipment refunds. On the dashboard, the billing reports can be found under the billing page in the user email dropdown menu. Reports can be downloaded as a CSV file directly from the browser or from your confirmation email.
Shipping reports
EasyPost has reports on key shipping objects in our system including shipments and trackers. You can create these reports from the dashboard by clicking into tabs from the main menu. Additionally, the "Reports" tab in the EasyPost dashboard contains a log of historical reports so you don't need to recreate the same report twice.
Reporting API
Our flexible reporting API is designed to support many use cases and can be leveraged to produce all of the report types described above. Many users build implementations on top of the reporting API to pull specific metrics into internal databases or internal BI tools with a regular cadence. The API is supported with webhook infrastructure so users can be notified when the report is available to be downloaded.
New reporting enhancements released
Several key improvements were made to our reports to dramatically improve their usability and have come directly from customer feedback.
Improved processing speeds up to 90%
Processing speeds are now lightning fast, improving processing speeds by more than 90% across all report types on both the EasyPost dashboard and API. No more pesky timeout errors!
More customizable reports
You can now customize which columns you would like to include in your reports - for all six reports. This can be done directly within the EasyPost dashboard by selecting which fields to include in the report or using the `columns` parameter in the reporting API.
More fields and data available
We've added several new metrics to the payment logs and shipment reports as well. Payment logs can include the object the payment was for as well as a breakdown of fees that make up the payment log. In addition, the shipments reports can include the "USPS Zone" for shipments allowing you to benchmark shipment spend by the distance of the shipment. This can be done directly within the EasyPost dashboard by selecting the new fields to include in the report or using the `additional_columns` parameter in the reporting API.
Stay tuned for additional features and updates
We will continue to add more improvements to our reporting tools in the future. Feel free to leave us feedback on additional reports, features, and data you'd like to have - it helps us to improve our solutions for you!