Thanks @lin_d_hop - I figured as much. So it seems that basically what we have here is that every instance that has ‘local dev’ is basically fudging this to provide what they need for their users while waiting for longer-term global process.
We in Aus have the same immediate need and business model opportunity to respond to this, and would like to do so in most effective way to:
a) provide immediate relief / satisfaction to our users that makes them excited about starting to pay for OFN
b) ensures that what we do in short-term is a step towards:
- awesome, flexible, customised reporting solution for ofn users
- reporting solution that can also be used outside ofn e.g. possibly read data from ofn and/or other tools
c) is easy to apply and use by other instances in the short term, possibly able to be rolled out also to those who don’t have local ‘friendly’ dev to play with things for them
So we’d love to understand pros/cons of the approaches you’ve taken in other places please 
It would be really helpful if you could each summarise your instance-level reporting / custom user solutions at a very high-level below to help us work out which is best way forward . .
@lin_d_hop could you document (even just a few dot points here):
- how you are doing this with Zapier
- estimate of complexity / cost for setting up for a user, including 1st one you do it for and if it gets easier / cheaper for later ones or not really . .
- other reporting use cases (e.g. not just the quickbooks solution) - I think maybe you are also send stuff to google sheets, I assume as custom reports? and so people can then customise their own?
@sauloperez similarly could you reply post here with high level non-dev explanation of Katuma Reports, including:
- why you did this
- what it does
- what it means for your users - are you running just one set of your own Katuma reports (that replaces standard ofn reports page) or are you running / customising different reports for different users? If the former, can it also do the latter?
- how easy for other instances to set-up and adapt etc?
@CLFC I know you have documented elsewhere, but could you also please post a high level summary here of how you are doing customised reporting so it’s all in the same place? thanks!
Last but far from least, we are fresh from lots of exciting conversations with @MyriamBoure about DFC, apis and options for doing things in ways that are easy to share also outside OFN (for us this is most pertinent for our partner CERES), which raises the question of experimenting with reporting in some kind of separate web app or component that can hit up ofn in the first instance, but potentially also draw data from other things down the track . .
If doing that, perhaps we could be using something like the uigrid thing that @oeoeaio and others worked on a while ago - http://ui-grid.info/ and [FEAT] UI-Grid Reports
or this thing - https://jsreport.net/ - which @maikel hasn’t completely kyboshed from his first glance.
@sylvain if there is something you can point to in web components land is an existing (or under development) option for reporting that would be good?