Monthly reports

What a report contains

A monthly report covers one site for one calendar month. It is 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 against the month before; 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, and everything published that month. A site's first scan is the starting point, so the cookies it found are not 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, on the day you print. Staging and unpublished banner changes stay off it, and anything the Status section already says is said there once.
• What visitors chose — decisions, the share that accepted something optional, Do Not Sell requests and Global Privacy Control signals, this month against 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, on the day you print.

A section with nothing in it shrinks to one line. A month with no finished scan says nothing was compared rather than passing silence off as no change, and a month with no decisions shows no acceptance rate rather than 0% — "nobody was asked" and "nobody agreed" are different facts.

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: August report, in September. 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, never 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 tick 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. Every selected site prints in one tab as one PDF, each site starting on a new page. Up to 50 sites print 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; a teammate limited to some organizations can print only those sites.

Why nothing is stored

A report is worked out from the scan evidence and the consent log each time it is printed. Nothing is generated ahead of time, scheduled or sent. That means a later print can differ, and the PDF you send is the copy that holds still.

Printed again later, the month's decisions, scans, the cookies that appeared and what was published read the same. Open and Status show the day you print, and 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 is for is always inside it. The month before the oldest one can pass it; that report then leaves the comparison out and says the earlier month is not 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: every decision, the banner version on screen, the region and a timestamp, exportable 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 says so on its face. It is not legal advice, and it does not certify compliance with anything. What it gives you is a dated account of what the site did, in a form your client and your counsel can both read.