Automated reporting for Capital Bikeshare data

Automated reporting is a useful tool in reducing the likelihood of human error, making analysis more transparent, and decreasing the amount of time spent creating repetitive reports. I have extensive experience of creating these types of reports using Quarto and R Markdown.

Reports can be rendered in a variety of formats including HTML documents, PDF reports, Word documents, or presentations. They can be customised and styled according to branding guidelines to give them a more professional finish. Creating parameterised reports means that you can use a set of parameters to create different variations of a report. For example, a report that is created every week to reflect company performance. The example below uses a reusable, custom template to create a monthly report of Capital Bikeshare usage data.

Quarto for automated reporting

Using Quarto or R Markdown, narrative text can be combined with code to create fully reproducible reports, and automate the reporting process. This example report takes a month and year as input parameters. The YAML at the top of the document defines these parameters, for example:

---
title: "Capital Bikeshare"
format: capitalPDF-pdf
params:
  year: 2018
  month: 5
---

These parameters also mean the report can be generated using:

quarto render report.qmd -P year:2018 -P month:5

to create a report for May 2018. Using scheduled GitHub Actions, this report could be generated on the last day of each month, and emailed out to the relevant parties - no manual labour required! My blog post on automating dashboard deployment gives a few more examples of how GitHub Actions can be used to schedule and automate tasks.

The current version of the report is available at github.com/nrennie/capital-bikeshare-report/blob/main/report/report.pdf. You can also view the source code for this report on GitHub.

Data

The data included in this report is available from Capital Bikeshare in a public repository at s3.amazonaws.com/capitalbikeshare-data/index.html. Further information on any pre-processing performed by Capital Bikeshare is available at ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data, and the license agreement at ride.capitalbikeshare.com/data-license-agreement.