Navigating and Using Deltek Costpoint Business Intelligence (BI)

Costpoint Business Intelligence (BI) is a powerful reporting tool for extracting, analyzing, and formatting your data. Built on IBM’s Cognos Analytics with Watson platform, Cognos BI can be used to develop reports and dashboards, prepare visual data presentations, and explore the underlying data in your Costpoint system.

Training on Costpoint BI tends to focus on designing new reports, and that is certainly a very important piece of the puzzle. For this article, however, we are going to shift the focus to the end-user. We will explore how to navigate inside Costpoint BI, how to run (and rerun) reports efficiently, and how to save the prompts and data for your favorite reports.

A Word About Versions and User Permissions

The instructions and examples in this article are based on typical interactivity available in cloud-based Costpoint instances, particularly those instances hosted by Deltek. It is very likely the same interactivity will be available for on-premises installations of Costpoint as well as instances hosted with other cloud service providers, but there might be subtle differences. For reference, the examples here were gathered from a Deltek-hosted Costpoint 8.2 (2025.1.2.5000) system.

Additionally, some features discussed here may not be available to a given user based on their assigned security permissions. If there is an interesting feature here that you cannot access, please contact the person in your organization who is responsible for managing Costpoint user permissions to discuss your options.

Navigating to Costpoint BI

Once you’ve logged into Costpoint, look for the Reports & Analytics option on the left-hand menu. Depending on your personal settings, you might need to click the “hamburger” button at the extreme top-left of the screen to see the menu.

Click on Reports & Analytics, and then click on Business Intelligence. If this is your first time in the Costpoint BI, you will most likely be greeted with a “Welcome to Costpoint Business Intelligence” splash screen. Otherwise, you will see a list of folders, reports, etc., on the content tab you last visited (more on content tabs below).

To close out of Costpoint BI, click on the white X button in the right-hand corner of the Costpoint BI viewing area, just a little below the Costpoint logout button. If you have any unsaved work in Costpoint BI, you will be prompted to save or discard it before closing.

Content Tabs

Across the top of the Costpoint BI viewing area, you will see a horizontal menu bar containing content tab links. Clicking on one of these links will display the contents of the tab.

Content tabs are a way to organize reports, folders, and other objects to make them easier to find and manage. The content tabs shown here are set up by default, but administrators have some flexibility to alter the existing tabs or even create new ones. The default content tabs are as follows:

Menu

The Menu content tab presents an organized list of available reports grouped by functional role or area. For example, the Accounts Payable group box lists several reports dealing with vendor management, 1099 processing, and AP aging. By default, the reports listed here are drawn from the list of predesigned reports that come with a fresh install of Costpoint, but reports created by your organization may also be added to the existing group boxes.

My Content

Initially blank, the My Content tab is where you can save reports and other objects that only you have access to. Unlike the Team Content and Company Content tabs, no one else can access items on the My Content tab. This tab is typically used by report developers as a temporary storage location as they work on new reports, but non-developers can save report views (shortcuts to existing reports, more on that later) in this tab as well.

Team Content

The Team Content tab contains predesigned reports that come with a fresh installation of Costpoint, organized into folders tied to functional roles. Team Content is also where packages are stored. Packages are special objects that serve as a connector and “roadmap” to help developers find the data they need to include when creating new reports. You probably don’t need to interact directly with the packages themselves, but just be aware that they exist on this tab.

Company Content

The Company Content tab is where your report developers will place new reports when they are ready for public use. This tab will probably be the main tab you will work from. All Costpoint BI users have access to the Company Content tab, although your administrators may restrict access to certain folders or reports as they deem appropriate.

Running a Report

The simplest way to run a report is to just click the report name on one of the content tabs. Doing so will bring up the report’s prompts (if any) and display the results in the report’s default format (HTML, Excel, PDF, etc.). However, you can also run the report in a way that overrides those defaults by using the Run as feature.

Instead of clicking on the report’s name to run it, hold your mouse over the report’s card. A small menu button that looks like three vertically arranged dots will appear at the top-right corner of the card. This is the Action menu button for the report. Click on that button and select Run as.

You will now see a set of override options for running the report. For example, you can have the report run in the background if it is a report that takes a long time to complete. Most importantly, you can choose the format for the report’s results by turning off the Use default format slider and selecting the format (PDF, Excel, etc.) you wish to use.

Regardless of the method used to run the report, the next step is almost always to fill out any prompts for the report. Clicking the Finish button at the bottom of the page will bring up the report’s results.

Rerun, Refresh, Reformat

If you find you’ve used the wrong values in the prompts, or if you need to see updated data after someone ran a process in Costpoint, you have options to rerun and refresh the report results as you are looking at them. To rerun a report and update the prompt values, click the Run button (a sideways triangle, like a play button on a remote) on the toolbar at the top of the Costpoint BI viewing area.

To the right of that button is the Refresh button (a circular arrow). Clicking this button will rerun the report with the exact same prompt values you used before. It is different from the Run button in that it will NOT allow you to change the prompt values used on the report.

To the right of the Refresh button is the Select a format button, which shows the current format (ex: HTML) of the results. If you click this button, you can choose to convert the results into a different format, such as PDF or Excel. This has the same effect as overriding the format using the Run as feature from earlier.

Quick note: the difference between the “Excel” and “Excel data” format options is that the “Excel” format will attempt to preserve your formatting choices (font size, spanned columns, etc.), whereas “Excel data” will return simple rows and columns with minimal data formatting.

Saving a Report View

A report view is a shortcut to a report that “remembers” the prompt values you used. For example, if you have a report that lists employees filtered by state, you might create a report view that just shows employees in North Dakota. The report view would still allow you to select another state at the prompt, but it would pre-populate the prompt with North Dakota, allowing you to just click the Finish button and see the results if you wish. This is most useful when you have multiple prompts on a report that you typically always set to the same values.

At the top-left of the Costpoint BI viewing area, click on the dropdown arrow next to the Save button to see your save options, and select Save as report view to name the report view and choose where to save it. Typically, you will only be able to save report views to the My Content tab.

Depending on the type of report and the permissions you have been granted in Costpoint BI, you may see different save options.

Subscribing To a Report

If you would like Costpoint BI to automatically run a report on a schedule and deliver the results to you, you can subscribe to the report. After running the report, click on the three vertical dots to the right of the Search content box in the top-right corner of the viewing area and select Subscribe. From here, you can select the day(s) of the week on which the report will be run, as well as the time of day, the format of the results, and the method of delivery. Note that the days change into a bold font when clicked, allowing you to have the report run multiple times in a week.

Some delivery methods may not be configured for your organization, such as Save to cloud. Generally, you will want to choose either Send report by email or Save report (which is the same as saving a report version from earlier) as the delivery method.

Click the Create button to start the subscription. You can view and disable existing subscriptions via the Personal menu at the extreme top-right of the Costpoint BI viewing area.

Getting Back to the Content Tabs

Let’s say you are done with the report you just ran, and you’d like to run another. To get back to the content tabs where you started, you have two options. You can close the report you are working on now by selecting the dropdown arrow next to the report’s name just above the Run button and then clicking the X to the right of the name on the dropdown. Note that you can have multiple reports open at once, and you can also use this method to switch between all open reports.

The second method is to click the “hamburger” menu at the top-left of the viewing area and select Home. This will take you back to the content tabs, but it will NOT close the report you were working with. In most cases, it doesn’t matter if you leave a report open or not, so either method is usually fine.

You’re Just Getting Started

Costpoint BI, running on top of IBM’s Cognos Analytics with Watson platform, is a very powerful reporting tool, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what an end-user can do with existing reports. Deltek has some great resources for Costpoint BI on their Learning Hub. For more advanced needs, Redstone GCI’s Costpoint Team can help with system configuration, role-based permissions, and maximizing your Deltek Costpoint setup. Our Data & Custom Reporting Team specializes in developing tailored reports, dashboards, and data-driven solutions to meet your organization’s specific needs. Whether you need customized training, assistance with complex reporting, or end-to-end support, Redstone Government Consulting is here to help.