TOPdesk reporting: why it takes more work

If you manage a team that works in TOPdesk, senior management will at some point ask you “So how are we actually doing?”, and you will know that the answer is going to cost you an afternoon. All the data is in TOPdesk. Turning it into an answer takes manual work, and that work has to be done again every month.

Below you can read why that is, and what you can do about it without starting a reporting project.

What TOPdesk already does, and where the manual work begins

TOPdesk has its own reporting module and dashboards, and they work well for standard questions, such as the number of open incidents and how they break down by category, or what each operator is working on. If your question fits what has already been configured, you have the answer in a few clicks.

It gets harder when your question is even slightly different. You want the resolution time of second-line incidents over the past two quarters, split by operator group, but excluding the ones that were waiting on the caller. Or you want to know how many changes were carried out and how many change activities they involved. Then you export the data, paste it into Excel, clean up the columns, build a pivot table and check that the total adds up. A month later you get the same question again.

The four questions your reporting has to answer

Before you build anything, decide exactly what you want to know. In practice nearly every reporting question falls under one of the four below.

1. How much is coming in, and is it growing?

Track incoming volume over time and choose the level of detail to suit the question, for example per day when you are investigating a spike or per month when you want to see a trend. A count without a trend tells you little, because whether 548 incidents is a lot or a little depends on the months before.

2. Are we meeting our commitments?

Break SLA compliance down by priority. One percentage for all priorities can hide a situation where you comfortably meet the target for low and medium priority but keep missing it for critical incidents.

3. Where does work get stuck?

Of the four questions, this is the hardest to answer and the one you learn most from. You need to know which operator group held an incident and for how long, and its total duration does not show that. Knowing that an incident has been open for three days tells you little if you cannot see whether it was forwarded three times and spent a day queued at each operator group.

4. How is the work distributed?

Check how the work is divided between operator groups and between people, so that you spot an imbalance early. The distribution is not meant for judging individuals on incident counts, which is a well-known way to make people chase the numbers while the work itself does not improve.

Why the Excel route keeps breaking down

Exporting and working through the data in Excel is a perfectly reasonable first step. It still tends to stall, for five reasons.

• It has to be redone each time. If a category has been added, last month’s pivot table is wrong this month.
• The figures are already out of date when you export them. Your report shows where things stood last Friday, which is of limited use when the meeting is about this week.
• Nobody can drill down. When someone asks which incidents are behind that bar of 41 critical ones, you have to go back into TOPdesk.
• Versions multiply. Two people build the same report slightly differently, and people end up discussing which number is correct, with little time left for what it means.
• The history is missing. An incident’s route between operator groups is not in the export, so with an export alone you cannot answer question three above in Excel.

Putting a manual report together takes time. In most cases, though, you lose more time because nobody can check the numbers between reports.

What a setup needs to keep working

A setup that lasts meets the conditions below, whether you build it in Power BI or in the TOPdesk reporting module, or use a ready-made dashboard.

• One source, no intermediate files. The figures come from TOPdesk itself, with no manual export in between, so nobody ends up with numbers that cannot be reproduced.
• Filters that apply to the figures too. When you pick a period and an operator group, the figures and charts are recalculated along with the table underneath.
• Drill-down to the individual incident. You have to be able to open the records behind every figure, because otherwise nobody can check it.
• Exports that match the screen. What you export is exactly what was displayed with the active filters applied, so the recipient sees the same figures as you did.
• Missing data stays visible. Where data is missing, a dash is better than a figure the dashboard has made up.

About the route between operator groups

Showing the history of operator groups goes wrong more often than you would expect. In the TOPdesk Operator Section, the Audit Trail tab shows which operator group held an incident and when. As far as could be checked when this article was written (September 2026), that information was not available through the REST API, either as a field on the incident or through a separate endpoint.

For incidents, the route is available in the TOPdesk reporting feed. The administrator switches on a separate permission in TOPdesk for this. For changes, as far as could be checked, there was no source: not in the REST API and not in the reporting feed. A tool that shows the route of changes therefore records the operator group changes itself. The route is then only tracked from the moment the tool starts doing this. For changes that were already open at that point, the timeline starts at the first check.

If a tool shows this route, ask which source the data comes from. If the tool tracks the route itself, also ask from what moment.

How to start

You do not have to tackle everything in one go. You can work in the order below.

1. Write down the four to six questions that people actually ask each month, and leave out questions that would only be interesting.
2. For each question, check whether TOPdesk already answers it. Often it covers two or three.
3. For the rest, decide whether to keep doing them by hand (fine if it is only a few times a year) or build them into a dashboard.
4. Start recording what you are not recording yet, above all the route of changes between operator groups. Outside TOPdesk you cannot retrieve the route of a change retroactively.

Outside TOPdesk, you will only have the waiting time per operator group for this month’s changes later on if you record it now, so start in good time. The figures on incidents and changes are less urgent, because you can still get them from TOPdesk in six months’ time.