Follow-up reports

A follow-up report is the document you give your reviewer. It holds the results you shortlisted, each with its question, its chart, its query and your note, and a place for a verdict. Reports live in the Validate pane, at the bottom of the left column. You export files from a report, with the buttons described below.

The reviewer is the person you choose to check the numbers before anyone relies on them: a colleague, your accountant, an analyst, or you, if that is your competence. The reviewer is not an AI, and not someone Totsum supplies.

Create a report

The Validate pane stays empty until you have shortlisted a result with ★; it says so, and points you to the Explore pane. Once something is shortlisted:

Press + New. A dated title is prefilled; change it if you like.
Tick the shortlisted results that should travel. The list shows the results not yet in a report, with a filter by title, Select all and Select none. A result belongs to one report at a time, and a report holds at most 40 results.
Choose the sections each result carries: Answer (the text the assistant gave, in its own words), Chart, Data (a sample if it is long), Statistics, Query flow and SQL. Everything opens ticked, so the full document is the default. The question and your note always travel.
Press Create report.

The report opens in the center. It starts with a statement that it is a first look, recorded for a qualified reviewer to judge, then one section per result, in the order the questions were asked. Each section shows the parts you ticked, frozen as they were at that moment: the answer as the assistant wrote it, the chart, the rows the Data tab showed, the statistics, the query flow diagram and the SQL. Later edits to the result do not change the report.

Record verdicts on screen

If your reviewer is at your desk, or if you are the reviewer, work on the open report. Each result has three verdict boxes, Valid, Invalid and Inconclusive, a notes field, and page one has a Reviewer line for the name. A verdict is stored the moment it is clicked; there is no Save button. The verdict and the comment then appear on the result’s Review tab and as a glyph beside its name in Explore: ✓, ✗ or ?.

Send it, and bring the review back

If your reviewer is somewhere else, the toolbar above the report has what you need:

Export PDF produces the finished report as a PDF with numbered pages, your letterhead and no fields to fill in. That is the file you send.
Export review PDF produces one PDF with the report and tickable verdict and notes fields. It opens in PDF readers such as Preview, Edge, Chrome or Firefox. The reviewer ticks one box per result, types the notes, writes their name on the Reviewer line, saves the file and returns it.
Import review reads a returned review PDF and brings its verdicts and notes into the report. The import says what changed, result by result, and asks before it replaces a note that is already there. A file exported from another report is refused, and a result with more than one box ticked stays unjudged.

The rows, the query and the note of a result stay in the report with its verdict, on your machine, so you keep the record of what was checked and what the reviewer concluded.

The blog post What to send your analyst describes what your reviewer needs from you: the original file and the report.

Change a report

The ✕ beside a result removes it from the report; its verdict and notes in that report are discarded, and the result becomes available for a new report.
Two zoom buttons show the page smaller or larger.
Branding… gives one report its own letterhead, instead of the application’s; the Settings page describes the fields.
Beside a result’s chart, data and query flow, an export button saves that section alone as a file: the chart and the query flow as images, the data as a CSV of the report’s frozen rows (Commercial license). The chart and query-flow images carry the report’s marks.

The marking and the watermark

The report’s pages and the images saved from it carry the marking “Generated by AI.”, so that a reader downstream does not mistake the AI’s work for a person’s. A report made with a Trial or Personal license also carries the license watermark. The licensing page has the full table.

What blocks an export

The free trial exports nothing: the whole loop works on screen, and a dialog says so when you try.
A Personal license exports the report watermarked, without the Data section. With Data ticked, a dialog offers to untick it or to register a Commercial key.
An applied What-if: while edited data is shown, no report can be generated or exported, because the charts, rows and query flows would be built from values that are not in your data. Press Reset in the What-if panel first.