Reporting Level - Can someone please explain this attribute?

Question

All - I am a relative newbie to Siebel on Demand but creating reports with other tools for years. I recently came across some reports that I have inherited that are constantly giving us trouble. They are basic reports that look at the count of calls, meetings, etc. for a given user. What we are finding is that we have used this reporting level attribute to filter but depending on the level of manager logging in it is causing problems. Some people can't see the data and some get a massive amount of duplicated data.
When it is all said and done we are looking for a simple manager-to-rep list of the counts of these activities. After looking at the reporitng level value it would look like an indicator of relative position from the lowest level in the reports-to heirarchy. We will generally filter for a level = 0 (or maybe 1) in most reports but what I want is a way to control that based on the user. My requirement is to have the level they can see and the detail at one level lower but I dont' fully understand how that gets created or how I can use system variables to find the user's level to control it.
Anyone that has any background info on this or how I can control a basic anaylytic report in a more maintainable fashion to show my stuff and subtotals at one level lower that would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Not sure if I can help with the specific report, but I will try to shed some more light on Reporting Level.
In any report where the Owned By User dimension is exposed, you can find the Reporting Level field. Each user is part of a reporting hierarchy, derived from the "Reports To" value in their user profile.
The best way to see this is to create a simple report with the User Email, Reporting Level, and Manager Email. This will show you the manager at each level. You can use this to expose and filter on the full management hierarchy.
Level 0 = the user. All users have a value of themselves as Manager at Level 0.
Level 1 = Reports To - who the user directly reports to.
Level 2+ = Up the chain...
You may want to take a look at some of the pre-built reports to see how this can be used to achieve Team based reports, such as "Team Pipeline Analysis", "Team Sales Effectiveness Analysis", and "Team Activity Analysis". You can open any of the pre-buiilt reports to use as starting points as well.