How to Run & Build Reports in Freshdesk

Where reports live in Freshdesk

Everything reporting-related sits under Analytics, reached from the Reports/Analytics icon in the left sidebar of your Freshdesk account. Open it and you land on a list of reports split into two families.

Curated reports are the ready-made ones. Per Freshworks' overview of curated reports, Freshdesk ships roughly 16 curated reports grouped into three themes: Track Helpdesk Health (Helpdesk Performance, Ticket Volume, Ticket Lifecycle, Timesheet Summary, Knowledge Base), Monitor Performance Efficiency (Agent Performance, Group Performance, Average Handling), and Gauge Customer Impact (CSAT Survey Results, Top Customer Analysis). You open one, read it, and move on.

Custom reports are the ones you build. You click New Report near the search bar and assemble a report widget by widget. The key thing to internalise before you start: a widget can't be added to a curated report — new widgets only go on custom-built reports. If you want to modify a curated report, you clone it first (more on that below).

Step 1: Run a curated report and read it

Start here, because it's fastest and it's usually enough.

1. Open Analytics from the left sidebar and pick a curated report — say Agent Performance.
2. Set the date range at the top. This is the single most important filter; a report of "the last 6 months" tells a very different story than "yesterday."
3. Apply the global filters across the top — commonly Company, Group, and Agent — to narrow the whole report to the slice you care about.
4. Read across the report's tabs. Agent Performance, for example, breaks out into Activity, Time, SLA %, Violations, Handling Time, and Availability — each a different lens on the same agents.

The widgets themselves are the payload. A summary-table widget lists raw counts (tickets assigned, resolved, reopened, private notes, responses); a chart widget trends those counts over time; a metric tile shows a single headline number like "SLA % = 100%." Reading a report well is mostly a matter of knowing whether you're looking at a total, an average, or a rate — a distinction we go much deeper on in the Freshdesk metrics worth tracking.

Step 2: Customize a curated report (by cloning it)

Here's the part that trips people up. You cannot edit and save a curated report directly — any filters you apply on the fly aren't saved. Per Freshworks' comparison of curated versus custom reports, the way to make a lasting change is to clone the curated report, which drops a fully editable copy into your custom reports. From there you can add filters, add widgets, and save it as your own.

So the mental model is: curated reports are read-only templates; the moment you want to keep a tweak, you're building a custom report — you're just starting from a head-start instead of a blank page.

Step 3: Build a custom report from scratch

When no curated report answers the question, build one.

1. In Analytics, click New Report near the search bar. Name it using the editable field top-left.
2. Open the Add Widgets panel on the right. You can start from a chart template in the gallery, or create from scratch with a blank Chart, Interactive Filter, Text, or Image widget.
3. Drag a widget onto the canvas. For a chart, pick your metric (e.g. Tickets created, Average resolution time, First response time), then choose how to visualise it — bar, line, table.
4. Add filters to scope the data (e.g. Status is Resolved, Source is Email). Per the introduction to Analytics, you get up to 10 filters and 2 group-bys per widget.
5. Add an Interactive Filter widget so viewers can slice the whole report themselves, and a Text widget to caption what they're looking at.
6. Save, and optionally share it with colleagues to make it public to your team.

The builder rewards restraint: one clear question per report, two or three widgets that answer it, and an interactive filter so people can drill in. The custom-reports deep dive walks through building a specific report end to end if you want a worked example.

Reading the widgets: totals vs averages vs rates

The most common reporting mistake isn't a broken filter — it's misreading a widget. Three quick rules:

• Counts (tickets created, resolved, reopened) answer how many and are sensitive to the date range. Doubling the range roughly doubles the count; always compare like-for-like windows.
• Averages (average resolution time, average handling time) answer how long and get skewed by outliers — one ticket that sat open for three weeks drags the whole average up. Watch for a median alongside it where the report offers one.
• Rates (SLA %, reopen rate, CSAT %) answer how often and are the ones to trend over time. A single week's SLA % is noise; the slope across twelve weeks is the signal.

Remember too that Analytics data refreshes roughly every 30 minutes, so a report won't reflect the ticket you closed thirty seconds ago. That's expected, not a bug.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Freshdesk's analytics are genuinely capable for a bundled reporting tool: the curated set covers the standard support questions, the custom builder is a real drag-and-drop canvas, and the widget library is broad. But it's worth being clear-eyed about the edges.

Plan gating is the big one. Per Freshworks' own comparison, both curated and custom reports are gated to the Pro and Enterprise plans on current Freshdesk and Omni tiers — teams on Free or Growth get report-level search and filters but not the full curated/custom experience. (Some older documentation lists curated reports from the Growth plan; availability is plan-and-signup dependent, so confirm against your own account.) Scheduling — sending a report on a recurring basis by email — applies to custom reports only; to schedule a curated report you clone it first, which we cover in how to schedule reports in Freshdesk. And role permissions matter: only the Manage analytics permission can touch schedules and exports, while View users can't edit anything at all.

The deeper limit is conceptual. A report measures the past; it doesn't change the future. Analytics will tell you precisely that 300 tickets came in about refunds last week, that first-response time crept up on Fridays, and that one agent's SLA % slipped — but the report can't read those refund tickets, understand each customer's situation, and draft the replies. Every insight still lands on a human who has to go do the work the number describes.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy work analytics can only point at. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Freshdesk you already use as a native connector — it does not replace your help desk or its analytics. You connect Macha to Freshdesk with your subdomain and API key, and it reads and writes the same tickets your reports count: drafting or posting grounded replies, triaging by intent so the categories in your reports are cleaner, and looking up order or account status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something the agent can call. That's also how you automate Freshdesk with AI beyond what a static report can do. (Macha's connector is for Freshdesk specifically — not Freshchat, Freshservice, or Freshcaller. And credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — see the pricing breakdown.)

The clean division of labour: keep Freshdesk's reports as the source of truth for what happened, and layer an agent on top for the part a report can't do — actually acting on the volume it counts.

FAQ

Where do I find reports in Freshdesk? Open Analytics from the Reports/Analytics icon in the left sidebar. You'll see curated (pre-built) reports and, on supporting plans, the option to create custom reports via New Report.

What's the difference between curated and custom reports? Curated reports are ready-made and read-only — you can open and filter them on the fly, but you can't save changes. Custom reports are ones you build from scratch by dragging widgets onto a canvas, choosing metrics, filters, and visualisations. To keep a change to a curated report, you clone it into a custom report first.

Are Freshdesk reports available on every plan? No. Per Freshworks' documentation, both curated and custom reports are gated to the Pro and Enterprise plans on current tiers, with Free/Growth limited to report-level search and filters. Scheduling applies to custom reports only. Availability is plan-and-signup dependent, so confirm against your own account.

How many filters can a report widget have? Up to 10 filters and 2 group-bys per widget. Analytics data refreshes roughly every 30 minutes, so a report won't reflect a ticket you just changed.

Can I add AI to Freshdesk reporting without replacing Freshdesk? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Freshdesk as a native connector and runs on top of your existing help desk and its analytics — it doesn't replace them. It acts on the volume your reports count by drafting grounded replies and triaging tickets by intent, while Freshdesk stays the system of record for what happened.

Ready to turn your report numbers into resolved conversations? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Freshdesk in minutes.