Monthly reports

What does a report contain?

A monthly report covers one site for one calendar month. It's written for someone who has never opened UserGuard, and it carries your account's name.

• A summary: decisions recorded and the share that accepted something optional, each compared with the month before, plus how many optional cookies were set before a visitor chose at the month's last scan, and how many cookies appeared or stopped being set.
• What changed: cookies that appeared and cookies that stopped being set during the month, by name, with who sets them, their domain and their category, along with everything published that month. A site's first scan is the starting point, so the cookies it found aren't counted as changes.
• Before consent: from the month's last scan, any optional cookie set before a visitor chose, and the vendors the snippet held until they did.
• Open: what still needs doing, in the same words as the site's Overview, as of the day you print. Staging and unpublished banner changes stay off it, and anything the Status section already says appears only there.
• What visitors chose: decisions, the share that accepted something optional, Do Not Sell requests and Global Privacy Control signals, comparing this month with last. Decisions made in staging are left out, as they are everywhere else.
• Status: whether the banner, the accessibility widget and the Do Not Sell link are live, and whether the cookie policy, accessibility statement and Do Not Sell notice are published, as of the day you print.

A section with nothing in it shrinks to one line. If a month has no finished scan, the report says nothing was compared, so a missing scan can't read as no change. If a month has no decisions, the report shows no acceptance rate instead of 0%, because "nobody was asked" and "nobody agreed" mean different things.

Printing one site

Open the site's Overview. Once the site has a finished month, the status band at the top of the Overview has a link named for it. In September, for example, the link reads August report. It opens the report in a new tab. Choose Save as PDF and your browser's print dialog saves it, already named for the site and the month.

The Month menu above the report goes back up to twelve finished months, but never to a month before the site was added. Months run midnight to midnight UTC, like the rest of the app, so last month's link appears a few hours before the month ends in US time zones.

Printing all of a client's sites

On the sites list, filter by the client's organization and check its sites. In List view on a wide screen, the box above the list selects every site shown. Then choose Print August in the bar that appears. All the selected sites print in one tab as one PDF, with each site starting on a new page. You can print up to 50 sites at a time.

Print one organization at a time. If a selection spans more than one, the page says so, because each client should get only their own sites. Anyone on the account can print a report, but a teammate limited to some organizations can print only those sites.

Why is nothing stored?

Because a report is worked out from the scan evidence and the consent log each time it's printed. Nothing is generated ahead of time, scheduled or sent. That means a later print can differ, and only the PDF you send stays fixed.

If you print the same month again later, its decisions, its scans, the cookies that appeared and what was published all read the same. Open and Status reflect the day you print. So do the site's and your account's names, cookie categories and who sets them, and whether the banner is switched on. The rest of the Before consent section uses the banner's settings as they were at that scan. A cookie that stopped being set and has since come back is no longer listed as stopped.

Consent records are removed once they pass your account's retention period, which is at least 400 days. The Month menu stops at twelve months, so the month a report covers is always inside that period. The month before the oldest one can fall outside it. When that happens, the report leaves the comparison out and says the earlier month isn't kept. If you need a month on file for longer, keep the PDF.

Reports and the consent log

The report is a summary a client can read. The consent log is the record behind it. It holds every decision, the banner version on screen, the region and a timestamp, and you can export it as CSV from the site's Consent tab. The report's figures match the Consent tab for the same dates, so when someone asks for the rows behind a number, set the Consent tab to that month and export.

A report describes what was observed, and it says so on its face. It isn't legal advice, and it doesn't certify compliance with anything. It gives you a dated account of what the site did, in a form your client and your counsel can both read.