Report Data Freshness, Repeat Runs, and the 5,000-Row Limit

Reports read from a separate copy of your dealership's data kept for reporting, they skip a repeat run of the same report within a few seconds, and they stop at 5,000 records. Each of those three can make a report look broken when it is working normally. This article explains what each one does and how to tell them apart.

Questions this answers

• "I finalized a deal about ten minutes ago but it's still not showing up on my sales report. Is something broken, or do I just need to wait?"
• "I clicked 'Run' twice in a row on one of my custom reports because I thought it hung, and now it says something about being 'throttled' — did I break it, and is the data I'm looking at even current?"
• "One of my custom reports shows a yellow bar saying the row limit was reached. How many rows am I actually seeing, and is my export missing records too?"

This article is about running a report and trusting what comes back. If the columns or totals are wrong, see the article on report columns and exports. If the report opens already filtered, see the article on remembered filters and briefing drill-downs.

A deal you just finalized isn't on the report yet

Reports do not read the same live copy of your data that the deal screens write to. They read a second copy kept for reporting, so that running a heavy report never slows down the people entering deals and taking payments. That copy trails the live data by a short interval.

So a deal finalized a few minutes ago can genuinely be absent from a report that is working perfectly. Run the report again in a little while and it will appear. Nothing needs to be fixed and nothing has been lost — if a deal is still missing from a report much later in the day, that is worth reporting, but a gap of minutes is normal.

"This report was just executed"

If you run the same report with the same filters and the same page twice within a few seconds, the second run is skipped rather than sent. There is also a cap on how many times a report can be run in one minute. When that happens you see a yellow notice reading This report was just executed — please wait a few seconds and try again.

Two things are worth knowing:

• You did not break anything. The request was skipped, not failed. Nothing is stuck and nothing needs resetting.
• The rows on screen are the earlier results, not new ones. Because the run was skipped, the previous results stay up rather than the grid going blank. If you were re-running to pick up a change, wait a few seconds and run it again — otherwise you are reading the older result.

The usual cause is double-clicking Run because the first click seemed slow. A single click is enough; give it a moment.

"Row limit reached"

Every report stops at 5,000 records. At the cap a yellow bar appears reading Row limit reached — this report is capped at 5,000 records. Narrow the filter to make sure nothing is missing.

This is the part that matters most: the records past 5,000 are missing everywhere, not just on screen. They are absent from the grid, from the printed output, and from every export format. A report that would have returned 12,000 records exports 5,000 of them, and the export gives no separate warning of its own.

There is no way to page past the cap to collect the rest. To get complete data, narrow the report until it comes back under the limit and run it more than once — most often by shortening the date range, or by splitting the run by lot, by salesperson, or by status — and combine the results yourself.

If you see that yellow bar on a report you regularly export, treat every past export of that report as potentially incomplete too.