Monthly service desk report: what goes in it

At the start of each month the management team wants to know how the service desk is doing. They want to see how much came in and whether commitments were met. They also ask how much work is still open. The figures are in TOPdesk. The report itself is often put together by hand, and that work has to be done all over again each month.

What management wants to see each month

A management team or executive board reads a monthly report differently from a team lead. They have no time for twenty charts. A handful of figures that appear every month is more useful, because anything unusual is then easy to spot. Five figures come up often.

• Inflow. How many incidents came in, and whether that is more or less than the previous month.
• SLA compliance by priority. Management mainly wants to know whether the highest-priority incidents were resolved on time, and an overall percentage tells them little about that.
• Backlog and age. How many incidents are open at the end of the month, and how many of those have been open for a long time.
• Resolution time. How long it takes from logging an incident to closing it. The median gives a truer picture here than the average, because a few incidents that stayed open for months pull the average up considerably.
• Customer satisfaction. How the callers who leave a rating judge the way their incidents were handled.

The first three figures tie in with the article on TOPdesk reporting, which asks how much is coming in and whether the service desk is meeting its commitments. It also asks where work is held up. The fourth question in that article, how the work is distributed, is often a better fit for the team meeting.

The manual work, and where it goes wrong

Typically you prepare a selection, export it to Excel, refresh a pivot table and paste the result into Word or PowerPoint. Then you write a few sentences to go with it. It works, and many service desks have done it this way for years.

Most errors come from redoing everything every month, and very few from the calculation itself. One month a filter is set slightly differently, or a new category has been added. The comparison with the previous month no longer holds, and nothing in the report tells you so. If nobody has written down whether time on hold counts towards resolution time, whoever makes the report decides that for themselves.

To compare with last month, you dig out the old file and hope it was put together the same way. And if the person who makes the report is on holiday or has left, the report is late, or it looks slightly different.

Scheduled reports in TOPdesk

TOPdesk can also generate a report and send it at set times. First you create the report with the Report Wizard. According to the TOPdesk documentation (accessed 24 September 2026), you can start from an existing selection. You then filter with a Card Filter and a Date Filter, which can be absolute or relative. After that you choose performance indicators such as number and duration and group the result, for example by category or operator. The SLA performance indicator is only available if you have the Contract Management and SLM module. For a report that runs every month, choose a relative date filter.

You schedule a saved report through More > Schedule. The steps below follow the page on scheduling reports (accessed 24 September 2026).

• Under “Output Type”, choose PDF or Excel.
• In the Output block, choose “Save Report” or “Send By Email”. For email, you fill in a sender, a subject and a message.
• Enter the recipients on the Recipients tab.
• In the Schedule block, select “Is Active” and set how often the report runs. “Run now” generates the report without waiting for the schedule.

The first time it runs, check that the period matches the previous calendar month exactly and does not simply cover the 30 days before the run date.

According to the same page (accessed 24 September 2026), scheduling is not available in TOPdesk Professional, and it requires the right permissions, including permission to create scheduled reports. You also choose whether the report runs with the permissions of a specific operator or with those of the recipient. With the second option, the result can differ from one recipient to the next. If the whole management team needs to see the same figures, choose this setting carefully.

The documentation does not say which frequencies the Schedule block offers, or whether you can enter addresses outside your organisation on the Recipients tab. The quickest way to find out is to try it in your own environment.

TOPdesk is still extending its own reporting. The Reporting Hub, currently in beta and available only in English, gained new dashboards in the February and May 2026 updates, including ones for incidents and customer satisfaction (accessed 24 September 2026).

If you already pull the TOPdesk data into Power BI through the OData feed, you can subscribe to a report there and have it emailed, monthly if you like. To subscribe other people, you need a paid Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licence, and attaching the full report is only possible in a workspace backed by Premium capacity or PPU (Microsoft Learn, accessed 24 September 2026).

Power BI Pro costs €12.10 per user per month, excluding VAT and billed annually (Microsoft’s Dutch pricing page, accessed 24 September 2026), and prices like these can change. Building and maintaining the report adds to the cost. When TOPdesk releases a new version of the OData feed, the report has to be updated as well. According to the TOPdesk documentation (accessed 24 September 2026), the old version is normally supported for about six more months, and existing reports may stop working when you switch. If the person who maintains the report leaves, someone else has to take it over, often without the knowledge that person had.

A fixed structure

Whichever tool you use, most of the work only goes away when the report is built the same way every month. To get there, you make a few decisions at the start and then stick to them.

• The same selection and filters. Record which operator groups and which types of incidents count, and whether incidents that were on hold are included. Save that selection and use it every month.
• Fixed definitions. Write down in an appendix what you mean by resolution time and whether you report the average or the median. A single line is enough, and it saves a lot of discussion in the meeting.
• Comparison with the previous period. Put last month next to every figure.
• One line of explanation per figure. The number itself is already in the report, so use the line to explain why it is what it is. For management, “Higher inflow due to the rollout of new laptops” is more useful than an extra chart.
• Exceptions at the top. Start with what stands out and what needs a decision. Someone who reads only the first paragraph should still have what they need.

How it works in AureaDesk

AureaDesk is a dashboard on top of TOPdesk. The Overview shows open incidents, SLA compliance, resolution time and customer satisfaction, among other figures. AureaDesk assesses SLA compliance against the target date that TOPdesk sets on the incident, so the percentage may differ from an SLA report in TOPdesk. For the monthly report, the export and the scheduled reporting by email are the features to look at.

• Export with the selected period and filters. In every package you can export to PDF, Word or PowerPoint from the Reporting menu, using the period and filters selected at that moment. The Word document holds the key figures and charts from the selected tabs and leaves out some cards, such as matrix cards and cards per person, except Workload per operator in Pro and Enterprise if the Figures per operator setting is switched on. An administrator can switch this setting on or off. You then add your own commentary. In every package, the View menu also lets you copy a link that carries your tab and all your filters, so next month you start from the same selection.
• Scheduled reporting by email. In every package you can set up a fixed report that goes out automatically, and colleagues without an account can receive it too. You choose PDF, Word or PowerPoint as the format. In every package, the email opens with the signals that apply at that moment, such as a major incident that is still open or a drop in SLA compliance.

For the management document with your own commentary, the export is often a better fit than the scheduled email. To see SLA compliance by priority, filter the dashboard by priority or use the cross-tab. The status switch on the Overview (All, Active or Closed) determines which incidents the SLA compliance card counts. The SLA compliance over time chart and the scheduled report count closed incidents only. The Pricing page shows what is included in each package.

An example layout

A monthly report that fits on two pages could look like this. Change the order to suit what your management team wants to see first.

1. Summary. Three to five sentences on what stood out and what needs a decision.
2. Inflow. New incidents this month and last month, by category or by channel if something is shifting there.
3. SLA compliance by priority. A small table with the percentage per priority for this month and last month.
4. Backlog and age. Incidents open at the end of the month, and how many of them have been open for more than 30 days.
5. Resolution time. The median, with last month alongside, broken down by operator group if needed.
6. Customer satisfaction. The average rating and the number of ratings, so it is clear how much weight the figure carries.
7. Notable events. Major incidents, large changes and other events that explain the figures.
8. Actions. Progress on the actions agreed last month, and what you propose now.

Keep the layout the same for six months before you change anything. Trends take that long to show, and management needs the time to learn where to look.