Product · Analytics & Reporting
You shouldn't need a BI tool to see how Saturday went. SP Photo Station's Reports Hub ships eight category surfaces — Sales, Visits, Capture, Profitability, Expenses, Staff, Shifts, Legacy — each with operator-grade drill-down. Real-time. Per-venue. Cross-venue. Same login.
Most venue photo programs run reporting in three places: a dashboard the POS vendor ships (limited, vendor-defined), a spreadsheet the operator maintains (manual, prone to drift), and a quarterly export into a BI tool (delayed, requires a data person). None of them answer “how did this morning go” in less than five clicks.
SP Photo Station's Reports Hub is built into the operator workspace. The data is already captured by the same platform that sold it; the dashboards are computed from the same database the operator audits. No export step. No vendor portal context-switch. Click a venue, click a date range, get the answer.
The depth is intentional: eight category surfaces because operators ask eight kinds of questions. Sales for revenue tracking. Visits for throughput planning. Capture for photo-quality coaching. Profitability for venue-level margin. Expenses for cost-side hygiene. Staff for performance management. Shifts for coverage planning. Legacy for the year-over-year conversations.
Where it earns its license
Labor cost (from punches × pay rate) lays over revenue (from POS) per location per period. The single screen answers 'is the Tacoma venue actually making money on Saturdays' without exporting to a spreadsheet.
Inventory: §B.7 + §B.14
Manager critiques + customer ratings aggregate per photographer with trend lines. Click into a low score to see the actual photos and the critique text. Photo-quality coaching has a real data backbone.
Inventory: §B.6 + §B.9
P50 / P95 / P99 visit durations per venue per program. Theme park ops runs against these — 'our holiday set should target a 4-minute session, our P95 is 8 minutes, why'. The answer is usually a specific photographer or specific equipment issue; the drill-down surfaces both.
Inventory: §B.7
POS attribution from booking → session → order links per-photographer revenue. Which photographers are upselling, which are processing sessions correctly. Fair compensation discussions get a fact base.
Inventory: §B.7 + §B.9
Cron-driven flash reports per venue land at 6am local time in your inbox. Visit count, average rating, top-grossing package, incident summary. Read on the way to opening; know your day before you arrive.
Inventory: §B.13
For tenants on the Hybrid Mode billing path, AI background removal and face indexing usage is metered per photo with the wholesale cost visible to the operator. Per-photo margin is a queryable number, not a quarterly mystery.
Inventory: §B.14
Under the hood
Sales, Visits, Capture, Profitability, Expenses, Staff, Shifts, Legacy. Each with operator-grade drill-down and per-staff permission scoping. Single hub at /admin/reports.
Computed at query time from canonical tables, not pre-aggregated. Performance comes from partial indexes on hot paths (a dozen+ idx_* indexes for report queries) and PG keyset pagination for time-range scrolling.
Each category respects per-staff permissions. Photographers see their own metrics but not others'; set managers see venue-level but not cross-venue; regional managers see all covered venues; studio owner sees everything via org-chart FKs.
Per-venue per-partner cron job runs at the configured local-time threshold. Snapshots persist to partner_flash_reports so reports remain queryable even when underlying data updates.
client_usage_events records every metered call (face index, bg-replacement) with wholesale cost. Operator sees margin = customer-paid minus wholesale on the per-photo report.
CSV export from every category with date ranges, filters, and column selection preserved. Stable read-only API for operators running their own BI on top of the data.
Common questions
CSV export and a stable read-only API are available. Looker / Tableau support via direct database connection is not on the immediate roadmap — the typical operator runs reporting in-platform.
Historical sales imports from operators' pre-SP-Photo-Station systems. If you have CSV exports from your old POS or photo platform, they can be loaded into historical_sales_imports and join into the year-over-year comparison views. Useful for the first season after switching.
Sales, visits, and capture metrics update within seconds of the underlying event. Profitability and per-photographer aggregations update at the next minute boundary (computed by a rolling worker). Flash reports are end-of-day snapshots, not real-time.
Partners see a curated subset of the operator's reports, scoped to their own venues. See the Partner Portal deep-dive.
The eight categories are platform-defined. Within each category, you can configure visible columns, default filters, and saved views per staff member. Adding entirely new categories is a roadmap item; for now, custom analysis runs via CSV export.
The Reports Hub respects permission boundaries. Photographers see their own sales-effectiveness score but not their dollar contribution to revenue; managers see both. Salary information itself isn't in the system (that's payroll's job); the platform reports on performance only.
We'll drill into your venue's last 7 days across all eight report categories, show the profitability overlay, and walk through the flash report you'd get at 6am tomorrow.
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