Reports

A report about a period, at Dashboard → A report on a period, or /applications/report/.

Two different people ask for this and they want the same document.

The first is an employment office. Unemployment benefit in most of Europe is conditional on actually looking — a minimum number of applications in a period, evidenced. Postulo already holds every one of those facts, and copying them out by hand is precisely the work that makes people stop keeping records at all.

The second is you. A month of looking feels like nothing happened. A page saying eleven applications across four weeks, none in the week of the 12th is the difference between a feeling and a fact, and it says where the gap was.

Choosing the period

A month, a quarter, the last few weeks, or dates you choose. Everything on the page is scoped to it, and nothing from outside it is ever counted.

The month box serves both a month and a quarter: choose a quarter beside September 2026 and you get July to September. The one before and the one after step by a whole period — a month before a month, a quarter before a quarter, and a range you gave by hand moves by its own length so it stays the same size.

There is never a link into the future. A report about next month is a blank page pretending to be a document.

The period is in the address, which means a report for a particular month is a thing to bookmark, to send to somebody, and to ask for again next year and get the same page back. That is the same line Postulo draws everywhere: a question lives in the URL, a preference lives on your profile.

How regularly

Regularity is what the report is named for, so it is the top of the page.

• Sent — applications sent in the period.
• A week, on average — that number divided by the weeks the period covers.
• Longest gap — the longest run of days inside the period with nothing sent.
• Weeks in a row, up to now — weeks with at least one application, counting back from the last week. If the most recent week has none, this is zero, and it says zero.

Then a bar per week, with the weeks that have none saying none in words rather than being an invisible gap.

Two things about the gap, both deliberate. It is measured inside the period, so a silence that began in March is not carried into April's report; and a period that has not finished is only counted up to today, because the rest of the month is not a gap anybody has had yet.

A week marked part of this week is outside the period straddles one end of it — a month rarely begins on the first day of a week. Nothing from outside the period is counted in it; the mark is there because a bar that is short because the week was short would otherwise mislead.

Weeks run from whichever day the language you are reading Postulo in starts a week on.

What came back

Replies, interviews attended, offers and rejections, counted by when they happened.

That is a different question from what was sent, and the two are kept apart rather than added together. A reply arriving in September to an August application is September activity — it belongs in September's report even though the application does not. Folding the two together would give a figure that is true of neither question.

One reply per application, not one per step. An application acknowledged, then screened, then interviewed in the same month had one reply; counting each step would report a busier month than happened.

Every application, in order

The evidence: date applied, company, role, where it was found, the address of the posting, the current status, and the date of the last thing that happened. One row per application, oldest first.

Applications drafted but never sent are not in it, and the page says so. An employment office is asking what was sent. If there are drafts in the period, the page says how many are being left out, so the absence is stated rather than silent.

Out as a document

Download PDF gives a document to hand over. It carries your name, the period and the day it was produced, because a document with no date is not evidence of anything. It is laid out for A4 with page numbers, and it lays out from the other edge in a right-to-left language.

Pressing it also files the report under Documents → Sent documents, as a report, with the text it was built from and a checksum, exactly as a CV you export is kept — a report handed to an employment office is the document you will want to find again. A store you have connected copies it like any other document, and the switch per kind on the connection lets you keep reports at home. Pressing twice on the same day files one document, not two; a report is frozen when you hand it over, never when you merely look at the page.

Download CSV gives the evidence list as a spreadsheet, for anybody who wants to do their own sums. Only the list — a cadence is a reading of those rows rather than a separate fact, so a spreadsheet holding them can produce its own.

Both take the period from the page you are looking at.

Addressed to your office, when you have recorded one. If one of your companies is of the employment service kind — see the employment service — the page and the document say For France Travail, name your adviser there if you have recorded one as a contact, and add one figure: how many applications in the period went through the office's own listings, which is what applied through: Employment service records. With no such company, nothing on the report changes.

A PDF needs a renderer. Postulo uses WeasyPrint by default and can use headless Chromium instead; if neither is installed the page says so plainly rather than failing. See Configuration for POSTULO_PDF_BACKEND. The CSV needs nothing.

What Postulo will not do

It sets no target. There is no "expected" or "recommended" number of applications anywhere on the page. How many a period should hold is a benefit regime's rule or your own, never this software's. If you want to record what you were told to do, that is a number you set, not one Postulo invents.

It has no template per country. IEFP, France Travail and the Agentur für Arbeit each want a list of what was applied for, where, when and what came of it, and one honest report answers all three. What a particular office asks for is worth checking with that office rather than being guessed at in software.

It is produced on request, not on a schedule. A monthly report arriving on the first of the month is an obvious thing to want once a scheduler exists, and it is a separate piece of work; getting the page right came first.

Where the numbers come from

The same place as the dashboard's: the event log, not current statuses. An application that reached an interview and was then rejected has a current status of rejected; counting current statuses would say you had no interviews. See Insights and the dashboard.

Nothing is stored. A report is computed when you ask for it, from records that are already the truth — which is what makes it a snapshot of the record at a moment, and why "edit this report" never means anything.