How to Build a Custom Report in Workiz (Step by Step)

A 2026 infotech.com Workiz review summed up the reporting story in one line: "could be more flexibility in reporting and workflow customization." That is the polite version. Talk to a $5M plumbing shop that just churned off Workiz and the wording is sharper.

The truth in the middle is this: Workiz reporting is fine for the operational basics and limited for everything else. The Custom Reports add-on closes about 60 percent of the gap. The other 40 percent requires a workaround. Below is a step-by-step on how to build the most useful custom reports inside Workiz, what to plan for in advance, and the three reports you still won't be able to build no matter what you pay.

1. Standard reports first: what you already have

Before you turn on Custom Reports, know what ships in the box. Out of the box, Workiz includes:

• Jobs report. Filter by status, tech, creator, tag, type, source, area, external company, date.
• Sales report. Revenue, invoice value, payments by date and tech.
• Leads report. Same filters as Jobs, scoped to leads.
• Timesheets report. Tech hours and labor cost rolled up.
• Inventory report. Stock by location, usage, reorder.
• Job Statistics report. Completed, cancelled, average duration, revenue by category.

Most $1M to $5M shops can run on those alone for the first 6 months. The signal that you've outgrown them: you're filtering one of these reports the same way every Monday, exporting to CSV, and doing the same math in Sheets. That repetition is what Custom Reports is for.

Top-performing residential shops run 6 to 8 jobs per tech per day. The Jobs report is how you check it. If your number is at 4, the cause is usually drive time, truck-stock shortages, or reschedules, all of which are visible in the standard reports without needing the add-on.

2. Turning on Custom Reports

Custom Reports is a Workiz Marketplace add-on. To enable:

1. Go to Settings, then Marketplace (sometimes called Feature Center).
2. Find Custom Reports.
3. Enable. Pricing is shown in-app and varies by plan. Reviewers report it sits in the same range as other paid add-ons (which Workiz reviewers note can run a few hundred dollars per month each).

Once enabled, you'll see a Custom Reports section under Reports in the main navigation, and your existing standard reports will gain the ability to add custom-field columns.

The Workiz pricing structure for context: 2026 plans run from a free Lite tier (2 users) up through Kickstart at $187/mo, Standard at $229/mo, Pro at $270/mo, with Ultimate priced on request. Add-ons stack on top of those base prices.

3. Plan your custom fields before you build the report

The single most important thing to know about Workiz Custom Reports: filtering and grouping only work on dropdown-style custom fields. Free-text fields and number fields show up as columns but cannot be used to filter or group.

This is buried in the Workiz Help Center and it bites every shop that builds custom fields without thinking about reporting first. If you set "Equipment Brand" as a free-text field, you will not be able to group your report by brand. You'll have to delete the field, recreate it as a dropdown, and re-tag every historical job, which nobody does, which is why historical data goes uncategorized.

The discipline to enforce before you create any custom field:

• If you'll ever want to filter, group, or count by it: dropdown.
• If it's just informational text: free-text is fine.
• For dates: use a date field for filtering by range.
• For numbers (job duration, equipment age, square footage): number field, but you cannot group on it directly.

For the broader checklist on keeping CRM data structured for reporting, see CRM data hygiene checklist for home service.

4. Building your first custom report

Walk through. From the Reports section:

1. Click New Custom Report.
2. Choose the data source. Job, client, finance, or custom field data. You're picking the primary table the report rolls up from.
3. Set a default time range. Last 7 days, last 30, this month, etc. Users running the report can override later.
4. Pick filters. Workiz applies these on top of the data. Common ones: status, tech, source, tag, custom-field dropdowns.
5. Pick groupings. This is the dimension your data rolls up by. Service type, tech, source, month.
6. Pick fields/columns. Modify the Fields menu to add or remove columns. All custom fields can appear here.
7. Set role access. Specify which user roles can run this report.
8. Save.

Once saved, the report shows up in your custom reports list, can be exported to CSV, and can be re-run on demand by anyone with access.

The four reports we recommend every Workiz shop build first:

• Revenue by service type, last 30 days. Group: service type. Sort: revenue descending.
• Conversion rate by lead source, last 90 days. Group: source. Columns: leads, won, won %, average ticket.
• Average ticket by tech, last 30 days. Group: tech. Columns: jobs, revenue, average ticket, vs last 30 days.
• Jobs by custom field (warranty status, equipment age, etc.). Group: your dropdown field. Columns: count, revenue, average ticket.

The fourth one is the one most shops miss. It's also where the add-on pays for itself, because that's where the operational story lives.

Text Clint: "revenue by service type this week, with comparison to last week and average ticket per service"

5. The reports Workiz still can't build

Gross margin per job

Workiz tracks revenue per job and labor cost per job (through timesheets), but does not roll up materials, truck overhead, or callback visits into a single gross-margin number per job. A 2026 infotech.com review flagged this explicitly.

Top-performing residential shops run 18 to 22 percent net margin, with the median closer to 8 to 12 percent. The difference lives in job-level margin discipline that Workiz cannot give you natively.

The workaround: export Jobs and Timesheets to Sheets, add a column for materials cost from your supplier accounting, compute margin in a formula. Or feed Workiz data through the API into a BI tool. Or text Clint and have it do the join across Workiz and your accounting source in one query.

Text Clint: "jobs last month with gross margin under 25 percent including labor, materials, and any callback visits, by tech"

Billable versus non-billable hours

The Workiz Timesheet report shows total hours, but does not separate overtime or billable vs non-billable hours. Multiple 2026 reviews flag this. The sold-hours ratio (billable time as a percentage of total clock time) should run 70 percent or higher for top techs and 55 to 60 percent for median performers, but you can't compute it without exporting and reconciling clock-in versus job-time data manually.

Cross-source customer timeline

Workiz stores customer records but doesn't merge them with SMS conversations, email threads, review responses, and call logs into one timeline. If a customer called Monday, texted Wednesday, and booked Friday, Workiz shows you the Friday booking with no context.

For a deeper take on what no CRM dashboard can answer, see questions no dashboard will answer. For how owners stitch this back together with an AI layer, AI agents for garage door companies covers the architecture for shops on Workiz specifically.

6. The Workiz API as the deeper workaround

When the Custom Reports add-on still doesn't get you there, the Workiz API is the next stop. Base URL: https://api.workiz.com/api/v1/. Auth is a token pair (token + secret), generated after you enable the developer API add-on from the Marketplace.

What you can pull:

• Jobs (paginated list or single).
• Leads (paginated list or single).
• Clients (paginated list or single).
• Invoices, payments, line items.

The pattern most $1M to $10M shops use:

1. Pull jobs and timesheets nightly to a Google Sheet via Zapier or Make.
2. Pull invoices and payments into the same sheet.
3. Layer formulas for margin, sold-hours ratio, and KPIs.
4. Build a Looker Studio or Metabase view on top.

That works. It also costs you a half-day of setup, ongoing maintenance, and one person who knows where the bodies are buried. For most owners, it's overbuild for the ask. Texting the question to an agent that already has API access is the cheaper path.

For step-by-step on connecting another CRM (Jobber) to Sheets, the same pattern applies: see connect Jobber to Google Sheets for the structural template.

Text Clint: "build me a margin report for last month using my Workiz job data and my QuickBooks expense data, grouped by service type"

7. Saving and sharing custom reports

Once you've built a custom report worth keeping:

• Save it with a clear name. "Revenue by Service Type, last 30, MTD" beats "Untitled Report 4."
• Set role access. Owners only, owners and dispatch, all-staff, etc.
• Schedule the export if needed. Most shops re-run the report manually, but you can set up a Zap to export on a schedule.
• Pin the link in your morning routine. Save the URL in your bookmarks bar or your team Slack so it's one click instead of three.

The single biggest gain from Custom Reports is not any one report. It's that you stop rebuilding the same filtered view from scratch every Monday.

8. When to skip the add-on entirely

Honest answer: a meaningful subset of Workiz shops should not buy the Custom Reports add-on.

You should skip it if:

• You run under $750k revenue and your team is 1 to 3 people. The standard reports cover what you actually look at.
• You're already paying for an outside reporting tool (Domo, Looker, Metabase). Don't pay twice.
• You're already paying for a layered AI agent (Clint, etc.) that reads Workiz through the API. The agent answers the same questions in plain text and you don't have to maintain saved reports.

You should buy it if:

• You're at $1M+ and tracking custom fields that matter (warranty status, equipment age, commercial vs residential).
• You're not ready to bring in an outside tool but you're tired of exporting to Sheets every week.
• You want one source of truth for the office team without paying a BI subscription.

For broader pros and cons of staying inside the CRM versus going to a separate BI tool, see home service BI tools compared.

Sources

• How to get tailored insights with custom reports, Workiz Help Center
• Building reports using custom fields, Workiz Help Center
• Create tailored business insights with Custom Reports, Workiz Help Center
• Field service reporting software, Workiz
• Workiz pricing plans
• Workiz Customer Reviews 2026, Info-Tech
• Workiz API Documentation