Create the SIMS Report for the new academic year

1. Open SIMS and log in as a user with Third Party Reporter settings
2. Go to Reports | Design Report
3. Go to Open an Existing Report
4. Open the Student focus
5. Find the Power BI reports - they are usually prefixed by the initials PB or SA. 
6. Specifically, we are looking for attendance reports for recent years. For example, ‘PB Attendance Marks 2122’ is the report for the 2122 academic year.
7. You may already have a report for the new academic year, in which case you can skip to the batch file instructions below.
8. Open one of the existing Attendance Marks reports
9. Click on the section ‘Data Fields’
10. Highlight the ‘Attendance marks (filtered)’ subreport.
11. Highlight the ‘Mark date is between’ section of the subreport.
12. Increase each of the years by one year (tip - use the mouse to select the year part of the date and click the up arrow to advance the year by one)
13. Go to the Default Output section
14. Amend the file names (eg Marks2223.csv). The directory location of the csv files is important but note that whatever you input here will be overridden by the /output parameter in the batch file (below) if you use one.
15. Save the report with a new name

A note about the CSV files

The CSV files will need to be output to a specific subdirectory. This new CSV file needs to be saved alongside the existing CSV files. Power BI will read all the files in this subdirectory and append them together to create a table with all the attendance marks for all the academic years. Note that this table can become very large and make the Power BI report slow. We recommend no more than 3 or 4 years of data be stored in the subdirectory. If your report gets slow, simply delete the earlier CSV files from the subdirectory and refresh the data in the report.

Amend the automated batch file

1. If you are automating the export process using the CommandReporter.exe file you will also need to amend the batch file. Your batch file will be automated by the Windows Scheduler program, which can also help you locate the batch file.
2. Open the batch file
3. Look for the CommandReporter.exe line that refers to last year’s SIMS report.
4. Change both the /output parameter to list the name of the new csv file (eg Marks2223.csv) and change the /report parameter to match the name of the new report you created above.