---
title: Analytics & charts — turn your data into clear pictures
description: A friendly starter guide to TSync Analytics — build charts and reports from your own data, compare periods, spot trends and unusual numbers, and export the result. No technical background needed.
product: TSync Intelligence 11.3.6
language: en
canonical: https://docs.tsync.pro/modules/tsync-analytics/
source: https://docs.tsync.pro/llms.txt
---

# Analytics & charts 📊

You already have a lot of information in TSync — invoices, payments, leads,
stock, purchases. **Analytics turns that information into clear charts and
simple reports**, so you can see how things are going and notice anything that
looks off, without exporting anything to a spreadsheet.

Think of it as the place where you ask your business a question — *"How is
revenue trending?"*, *"Which months were unusual?"*, *"Are we spending more
than last quarter?"* — and get back a picture you can read in seconds.

No formulas to write, no data-science background needed. You pick what you want
to look at, and TSync builds the chart for you.

## Your first chart, step by step

1. **Open Analytics** from the menu on the left.
2. **Create a dataset.** A *dataset* is just "the slice of data I want to look
   at" — for example *invoices from this year*. Choose a source (invoices,
   payments, leads, stock, purchases…), tick the columns you care about, set a
   date range, and save.
3. **Click "Run analysis."** TSync looks at your data and suggests the analyses
   that make sense for it (see below) — you don't have to know which one to
   pick.
4. **Read the chart.** Hover for exact values, and **click on any bar or point
   to see the actual documents behind it** (more on that just below).
5. **Export it** to PDF or CSV when you want to share or keep it.

That's the whole loop. Everything else on this page is about doing more with it.

> 💡 In a hurry? Skip the dataset-building and start from a **template** — a
> ready-made report for a common question. See *Ready-made reports* further
> down.

## What would you like to do?

### 📈 See how something is trending over time

Pick a date column and a number (revenue, payments, stock movements…) and TSync
draws a **time-series chart** — a line that shows the value rising and falling
across days, weeks or months. It's the fastest way to answer *"are we going up
or down?"*

Need to watch **two things at once** — say revenue and number of invoices on
the same chart? Analytics can show a **dual-axis chart**, with one measure on
the left and the other on the right, so you can see how they move together.

### 🔍 Spot unusual numbers (outliers) automatically

Sometimes one value just doesn't fit — a suspiciously large invoice, a sudden
drop in leads, an odd spike in expenses. TSync can **find these unusual values
for you** and highlight them, instead of you scanning long lists by hand.

You can even **turn on an automatic nightly check**. If something out of the
ordinary shows up overnight, you'll see a warning on your dashboard and in the
Analytics anomaly list the next morning — with a direct link to the records
that caused it, so you can look into it straight away.

(In plainer terms: "anomaly detection" simply means *"point out the numbers
that look unusual compared to the rest."* It's a flag for your attention, not a
verdict.)

### ⚖️ Compare two periods

Want to know how this month stacks up against last month, or this quarter
against the same quarter a year ago? Use **Compare periods**.

Pick a "before" and an "after" — there are ready presets for month-over-month,
year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, or choose your own dates. TSync shows
both side by side and tells you the change in plain words, for example:
*"Revenue increased 12.3% (48,200 vs. 42,900) compared to last month."*

### 🧮 See totals you can actually trust (currency-safe)

If your invoices are in several currencies, simply adding the numbers together
gives a meaningless total. TSync **won't quietly do that.** When a total would
mix currencies, it stops and offers you safe choices instead:

- show one total **per currency**, or
- **convert everything** to a single currency (using the official exchange
  rate) and total that.

The same care applies to mixing units (you can't add kilograms to hours). The
result: the totals you see are honest. If a value couldn't be converted — say a
rate for that day isn't available — TSync tells you rather than hiding it.

### 🔗 Click a chart to see the real documents behind it

This is the part people love. **Any point on a chart is a doorway back to your
data.** See an unusually tall bar in a histogram of invoice totals? Click it,
and TSync shows you exactly which invoices fall in that range. Click an invoice,
and you land on that invoice in TSync.

It works across chart types — bars, scatter points, time-series, highlighted
outliers — so you're never looking at a number you can't trace back to its
source.

### 🔭 Look ahead (carefully)

Analytics includes tools that study your past numbers — how they trend, whether
they swing around, whether there's a weekly or seasonal rhythm — to help you
**think about what might come next**. For example, a revenue line can be
extended forward as a rough projection, shown with a "likely range" band around
it rather than a single hard number.

Please read these as **exploratory, "what-if" estimates, not promises.** They
are there to support your judgement, never to replace it, and they always show
the range of uncertainty so you know how much to lean on them.

You may see a few of these described with technical-sounding names. Here's what
they actually do for you, in plain terms:

- **Forecasting** — extends a trend forward as a best-guess projection, with a
  likely range.
- **Risk / "Monte Carlo" simulation** — runs many "what-if" rounds with the ups
  and downs your data has shown, then tells you things like *"in most cases the
  result lands between X and Y"*. Useful for cash-flow or stock-risk questions.
- **Grouping / segmentation** — sorts records into natural groups (for example,
  customers that behave similarly) so patterns are easier to see.

### 📤 Export and share

Any chart or report can be **exported to PDF** (nicely laid out with your
company logo and colours) or to **CSV** if you'd rather take the raw numbers
into a spreadsheet. Great for board packs, supplier reviews, or just keeping a
record.

### 💾 Save an analysis to reuse later

Built something useful and want it back with one click? **Save the analysis**
(it remembers the dataset, the analysis you ran and its settings) and find it
again under **Analytics → Saved analyses**. From there you can **re-run** it on
the latest data, or delete it. Your saved analyses are private to you.

### 🔗 Send someone a read-only link

Need to show a chart to a colleague — or someone outside TSync — without giving
them a login? Create a **share link**. TSync gives you a private web address
that opens just that one result, read-only, with no access to anything else.
You choose how long it stays valid (it expires automatically), and you can
**revoke** any link at any time from **Analytics → Shared links** (where you
also see how many times each one was opened).

## Ready-made reports

Don't want to build anything from scratch? Open **Analytics → Templates** for
a set of **one-click reports** answering common business questions. Each one
already knows which data to use and which chart to draw — you just run it.
Examples:

- **Revenue trend** — your sales over time, with a forward projection.
- **Payment behaviour** — how long customers typically take to pay.
- **Lead pipeline health** — where your leads sit in the funnel.
- **Expense breakdown** — where the money goes, by category.
- **Customer concentration** — how much of your revenue comes from your top few
  customers (the classic "80/20" view).
- **Cash-flow outlook** — a "likely range" view of money in vs. money out.

## Get told automatically

You don't have to keep checking. Analytics can **notify you when something
matters**:

- **Alert rules** — set a condition like *"revenue drops below this amount"* or
  *"this expense category jumps more than 20% versus last month"*, and TSync
  alerts the right people when it happens. A built-in cooldown keeps it from
  nagging you repeatedly about the same thing.
- **Weekly digest** — a tidy summary email (with an optional PDF) that lands in
  your inbox on the day and time you choose, covering your key numbers this week
  vs. last, anything unusual that was spotted, and your pinned charts.

## Supply-chain insights (if you run stock & purchasing)

When the Warehouse and Purchases modules are in use, Analytics adds a few
purchasing-focused views:

- **Supplier scorecards** — each supplier gets a simple 0–100 score based on
  things like on-time delivery, quality, and price stability, so weak links
  stand out.
- **What to stock closely vs. loosely** — items are sorted by how much value and
  how much demand-variability they carry, which points you toward a sensible
  reorder approach for each.
- **How much to reorder** — a suggested order quantity and reorder point per
  item, based on your real consumption.
- **Delivery-time trends** — whether a supplier's lead times are improving,
  steady, or slipping.

## For administrators — settings & the optional engine

Open **Analytics → Settings** (admin only). Everything here is optional — the
everyday charts work out of the box — but this is where you tune the module and,
if you want them, switch on the advanced views.

**The Python engine is an optional, separate service.** The heavier calculations
(forecasting, anomaly detection, Monte Carlo risk, regression, distribution
fitting, clustering) can be handed off to a small **Python engine that runs on
its own, outside TSync** — it is never bundled into TSync itself. Setting it up
is your administrator's choice:

- **Engine URL** — the web address where the Python engine is running (for
  example `http://localhost:8501`). **Leave it blank and the status simply reads
  "Not configured" — that is normal, not an error.** TSync just uses its built-in
  PHP calculations for the everyday work and quietly hides the advanced views
  until an engine is set up.
- **Engine Token** — an optional access key, if your engine requires one for
  authentication.
- **Engine health** — once a URL is set, TSync shows whether the engine is
  *Online*, *Offline*, *Error* or *Not configured*, with response time and
  version. There's a separate **Engine Monitor** page for a live view.

**How each dataset gets its numbers (connection mode).** When you build a
dataset you pick how its analyses are computed:

- **PHP native** — built into TSync, always available, no setup. Covers the
  everyday statistics (descriptive figures, correlation, distribution).
- **External Python engine** — sends the heavy work to the Python service above,
  unlocking forecasting, anomaly detection, Monte Carlo and the rest. (In some
  places this is also labelled *http engine* / *python engine* — they mean the
  same external service.)

If a dataset asks for the engine but none is configured or reachable, TSync says
so plainly and falls back to what it can do in PHP, rather than erroring out.

**Other settings on the same page:**

- **Auto anomaly scan** — turn the automatic nightly outlier check on or off, and
  set how strict it is (how far from normal a value must be before it's flagged).
- **Default forecast horizon** — how many days ahead forecasts look by default.
- **Max dataset rows** — a safety cap on how much data a single dataset pulls in.
- **Weekly digest** — switch the summary email on, and choose the day and the
  recipients.

## Good to know

- **TSync suggests the right analysis.** Open a dataset and it recommends the
  analyses that fit your data, and even the chart type — so you're not guessing.
- **It refuses to mislead you.** Unsafe totals (mixed currencies or units) are
  blocked with a clear explanation and a safe alternative, not silently fudged.
- **Some advanced views are optional.** Forecasting, outlier detection and risk
  simulations rely on an extra calculation service your administrator may set
  up. The everyday essentials — charts, trends, comparisons and basic
  statistics — always work without it. If an advanced view is unavailable,
  TSync says so plainly instead of erroring out.
- **Empty screen?** That usually just means there's no data for that slice yet,
  not that something is broken. As you work in TSync, the charts fill in.
- **Available in your language** — like the rest of TSync, in English, Romanian
  and Russian.

## Where to go next

- 📊 Want the big-picture health score and early warnings rather than
  build-your-own charts? See [Business Intelligence](tsync-intelligence.md).
- 📦 Analytics reads your stock data too — [Warehouse guide](tsync-warehouse.md).
- 🛒 And your purchasing data — [Purchases guide](tsync-purchases.md).
- 🏠 Lost? Head back to [Getting started with TSync](../index.md).
- 🙋 Stuck on something? [Contact support](../support.md).