Solutions for reports that don't sort, show, or download the way you expect.
Fixing report date sorting
If you sort a report by a date column and the rows come back jumbled — all the Thursdays bunched together, months out of order — the column format is almost always the reason. Long date formats that start with the day of the week get sorted as text rather than as dates.
Fix the date column format
Go to the Reports tab and open the report.
Click the gear icon and choose Manager/Filters.
Find your date column — usually Event Date — and look at the format it's set to.
If it's a long format beginning with the weekday, change it to Date Short (YYYY-MM-DD).
Close Manager/Filters and re-run the report.
Hover over the date column header and click to sort ascending or descending.
The rows will now come back in true chronological order, because YYYY-MM-DD sorts correctly whether it's read as a date or as text.
Why the long format behaves this way
A format like "Thursday, October 2, 2026" starts with the weekday, so sorting it alphabetically puts every Friday before every Monday, and inside each of those groups the dates stay in no particular order. It looks like the sort is ignoring your dates, but it's sorting exactly what it sees — text that happens to begin with a day name.
Date Short (YYYY-MM-DD) puts the year first, then the month, then the day, so alphabetical order and date order are the same thing. That's why it's the format to use any time you plan to sort or filter by date.
If that doesn't work
Check you changed the format on the column you're actually sorting on. Reports often carry more than one date column — event date, contract date, invoice date — and it's easy to reformat one and sort by another.
Make sure the change saved. Re-open Manager/Filters after re-running and confirm the column still shows Date Short.
If you need the long weekday format on the finished report and the rows in date order, that combination isn't available today. Sort and export using Date Short as a workaround, and if the long format matters for how you present the report, start a chat from the messenger and we'll take a look.
Good to know
Set your date columns to Date Short when you first build a report, before you save it. Then every future run comes back sortable without any extra steps.
This applies to exports too. A CSV built from a long-format date column sorts the same way in your spreadsheet, for the same reason.
Saved report showing too few shows
If a report you've saved and re-run for months suddenly comes back with far fewer rows than you'd expect, there's a quick test that tells you whether your filters are hiding rows or whether the saved report itself is the problem.
Test it by rebuilding the report
Go to the Reports tab and open your saved report.
Note the report type, the filters in the top right, the date range, and the row count you're getting.
Go back to the Reports tab and click Create New Report, choosing the same report type.
Set the same filters, date range and columns from scratch.
Click Create Report and compare the row count with your saved report.
What the result tells you:
Both reports return the same small number of rows. Your filters are excluding the rows. Clear every filter in the top right and run it again — if everything reappears, work back through the filters one at a time to find the one that's cutting the rows out. The date range and the status filter are the two usual culprits.
The rebuilt report is complete and the saved one is short. The saved report definition is what's limiting the results, not your filters. Use the rebuilt report in the meantime — save it under a new name and it'll behave normally.
If that doesn't work
If the rebuilt report comes back complete and the saved one stays short, this one needs our team — start a chat from the messenger and we'll take a look. It helps to have ready:
The exact name of the saved report
The report type it was built from
The filters and date range
The row count from the saved report and from the rebuilt one
Good to know
Rebuilding is worth doing before anything else whenever a report looks off. It separates a filter problem from a saved-report problem in a couple of minutes, and it also gives you a working report to use straight away.
Check the date range covers the event dates you're thinking of. A booking's event date can sit well outside the month the deal was signed in, which catches people out when a report looks short.
Make sure you're on the right report type. A show that appears in the Events report won't necessarily show up the same way in a deal-level Bookings report.
Fixing field codes showing in a report template
If your template comes out full of merge codes rather than real values — artist names, fees, dates — the template is almost certainly being run from a different report type than the one it was built for.
Run the template from the right report type
Go to the Reports tab.
Check which report type you ran the template from — Bookings, Events, Invoices or Settlement.
If it's a Settlement template, go back and start from the Settlement report instead.
Set your filters and run the report again with the template applied.
The merge codes should now fill in with real values.
Why this happens
Report templates are bound to one report type. A Settlement template knows how to pull settlement fields, and those fields only exist inside the Settlement report. Run that same template from Bookings or Events and there's nothing for the codes to match against, so they come through as raw codes rather than values.
It's the same template either way — nothing is broken and nothing needs rebuilding. It just has to be run from the report type it belongs to.
If that doesn't work
Check whether only some codes are unfilled. If most of the template populates and a few fields stay as codes, those fields may not exist on that record — a settlement field won't fill in on a show that hasn't been settled yet, for example.
If you're not sure which report type a template was built for, start a chat from the messenger and we'll take a look. Have the template name to hand.
Good to know
Settlement is the report type templates are built against, so Settlement is the first place to try if you've inherited a template and don't know its origin.
Naming templates with their report type in the name — "Settlement – tour recap", say — saves a lot of guessing later, especially when several people on the team run them.
Applying a template doesn't change your saved report or its columns. You can try a template against a report, see the result, and run it again from a different type without undoing anything.
Grouping deposit and balance invoices in reports
On the Invoice report, the deposit and balance invoices raised against a single booking can end up separated from each other once you sort by a column such as date, amount or artist. Sorting by Invoice ID brings them back together.
Put related invoices back together
Go to the Reports tab and open your Invoices report.
Hover over the Invoice ID column header.
Click to sort ascending.
Invoice IDs are issued in the order the invoices were created, so sorting by that column puts each booking's deposit immediately before its balance and keeps the whole report in chronological order at the same time.
If that doesn't work
Make sure Invoice ID is actually one of your columns. If it isn't, open the gear icon > Manager/Filters and add it, then re-run the report before sorting.
If you sorted by another column afterwards, the grouping goes again — sorting is single-column, so the last column you click wins. Sort by Invoice ID last.
If you'd rather group in your spreadsheet, download the report as CSV and sort by invoice ID there. Anything you do in the spreadsheet stays in the spreadsheet and won't change the saved report.
Good to know
If your dates look out of order as well as your invoices, that's a separate thing — check the date column's format under Manager/Filters and set it to Date Short (YYYY-MM-DD). See the article on report dates sorting in the wrong order.
Save the report once it's sorted the way you want, so you're not re-doing this every month.
The Invoices report is invoice-level: one row per invoice, which is why a booking with a deposit and a balance shows up twice. If you want one row per booking instead, run a Bookings report.
Previewing PDFs before downloading
Whether a PDF previews on screen or saves to your computer depends on which control you clicked. The download icon always downloads — it never previews. There are separate ways to view a document first.
Preview instead of downloading
Pick the control that matches what you want:
To save the file — click the download icon. This always downloads and won't show you a preview first. That's what it's for.
To preview an invoice — click the invoice link itself rather than the download icon. The invoice opens on screen for you to read.
To preview a contract — open the booking, go to the History tab, and open the contract from there. It opens for viewing rather than saving.
If it saves without asking where
If the file lands in your Downloads folder without a save dialog, that's your browser's own download setting rather than anything in Gigwell. Every browser has a setting along the lines of "Ask where to save each file before downloading" — switching it on gives you the save dialog back.
Some browsers also have a separate setting for whether PDFs open in the browser's built-in viewer or download automatically. If you'd rather PDFs always opened on screen, that's the setting to look for in your browser's downloads or site settings.
Good to know
Nothing is lost by downloading. A downloaded PDF is the same document you'd have previewed, and you can open it from your Downloads folder.
If a download doesn't appear to happen at all, check whether a pop-up blocker or a browser extension is stopping it. See the article on the dashboard or reports not loading for how to rule those out.
Report output works the same way: Create Report runs the report on screen, and the PDF and CSV buttons download the result.
If you have any questions or need additional help, please reach out to support@gigwell.com or use the chat widget on your screen.