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Most Totara customers do not have a reporting problem in their first year. They have one in their third, when the questions change from "who has not completed the course" to "is this programme reducing incidents" or "which certifications are lapsing in the region with the highest turnover". The first question lives inside the LMS. The second and third do not.
This guide is written by a Totara partner that also builds a reporting product, so you know where it will end up. It starts somewhere else: with what Totara's own report builder does well, because for a lot of organisations it is enough, and buying a second tool before you have outgrown the first is money spent on the wrong problem.
What Totara's report builder does
Report builder is part of Totara LMS, not an add-on. A site administrator can create a report from scratch or from a template, choose the columns and filters, and share the result with users by role. Totara documents more than 90 report sources, each one a defined set of data such as course completion, certifications, programmes, skills, seminar attendance or user profiles.
Within that, it covers a lot of ground:
- Graphical output, including column, bar, line, pie, donut, area, scatter and progress charts.
- Scheduled delivery by email to named people or groups, and export to CSV, Excel and PDF.
- Saved searches, so a manager can return to the same filtered view without rebuilding it.
- Content restrictions that filter a single report by the viewer's position, organisation, reporting line or audience, so one report can serve every manager and each sees only their own people.
- Dashboards that bring reports together for a particular group of users.
- Tenant-level reporting when multitenancy is enabled, so a tenant's own administrators can build reports on their tenant's data.
- Compliance and certification reports with drill-down, which is where most regulated customers spend their reporting time.
If your reporting needs look like "show each manager their team's overdue compliance training and email it every Monday", report builder does that well, and you should use it.
Where the report builder stops
None of what follows is a defect. Each limit comes from report builder being designed to report on Totara, from inside Totara. The limits only matter when your questions stop being Totara questions.
One report, one source
Totara's documentation is direct about this: each report has one report source. A report built on certification data cannot also pull columns from a source it was not built on. When a question spans two sources, the options are two reports side by side, an export and a spreadsheet, or a new report source.
New sources are development work
Additional report sources can be written, and Totara's documentation says your Totara partner can create them. That is a development task, written in code against Totara's database, and it becomes something you own and maintain. Totara's own report source documentation tracks columns that change and are deprecated between versions, so a custom source is not a one-off cost.
The data has to be in Totara
Report sources report on data held within Totara. HR import can bring people, positions and organisations in, and those fields are then reportable. But revenue, CRM records, incident data, payroll, patient outcomes and anything else held in another system are not available to report builder unless someone moves them into Totara first. That is the limit most organisations hit, because it is where the questions leadership asks tend to live.
Performance settings trade off against multitenancy
Report builder offers performance settings such as requiring search criteria before a report runs, and caching. Totara's documentation notes that report builder caching does not work when multitenancy is enabled. For an extended enterprise site with many tenants and large completion tables, that is worth testing on your own data before you commit to a reporting design.
Building reports is an administrator task by default
By default a site administrator builds reports and makes them available to other roles. The permission can be extended, and tenant domain managers can build tenant reports. In practice, most organisations keep report creation with a small number of administrators, which means a programme manager with a new question joins a queue.
A simple test
Picture report builder as a very good set of labelled filing drawers. Each drawer holds one kind of record, and it is quick to pull a sorted, filtered folder from any single drawer and send it to the right people on a schedule. It is not built to lay folders from three drawers, and a cabinet in another department, side by side on one desk.
So ask of each reporting question:
| If the question... | Use |
|---|---|
| Can be answered from one Totara report source | Totara report builder |
| Needs to reach managers, filtered to their own teams, on a schedule | Totara report builder |
| Combines two or more Totara sources in one view | A reporting layer, or a custom report source |
| Joins Totara data with HR, CRM, finance or commerce data | A reporting layer |
| Has to be answered by programme managers without an administrator | A reporting layer |
| Is a board or executive view across learning, compliance and revenue | A reporting layer |
If every row you care about lands in the top two, stop here. You do not need anything else yet.
Where Zoola starts
Zoola Analytics is Lambda Learning's own reporting product, built and maintained by us for Totara, Moodle and Lambda Store. It is not another LMS and it is not an alternative to Totara. It is a reporting layer that sits on top of the LMS you already run, and it is designed for the rows at the bottom of that table.
It connects directly to Totara, so learner, course and compliance data is available without a manual export, and it can bring in external HR, CRM and finance data alongside it. That is the difference that matters most: a compliance view can sit next to the HR data that explains it, and a programme's completion can sit next to the revenue it produced.
It is built for people who are not analysts. Programme and operations managers can build their own reports with drag-and-drop filters and add the custom fields and calculations your organisation reports on, which takes report creation out of the administrator queue.
It works inside Totara as well as beside it. The Zoola Reports block embeds Zoola reports and dashboards directly in Totara, with access granted to individual users or to audiences, so learners and managers see them without leaving the LMS. Because access is audience-based, the same rules you already use to assign learning can decide who sees which report. Reports can also be scheduled by email or PDF, shared as web dashboards, and restricted by role.
It does not replace report builder. Most Totara customers who add Zoola keep report builder for the operational reports it already does well, and use Zoola for the questions that cross sources or systems. The two are complementary, which is why adding Zoola does not mean unpicking anything you have already built in Totara.
If you already run Power BI or Tableau, Zoola can feed them rather than compete with them. We have written separately about when a general BI tool is the right choice for LMS data and when it is not, in Build vs. Buy: Should You Use Power BI for Your Moodle or Totara Data?
What this looks like in practice
Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance runs four partner hospitals in Ontario on managed Totara with Zoola Analytics. Before, a compliance report took half a day to assemble. Reports are now available on demand, with hundreds of hours recovered annually. Read the case study: https://www.lambdalearn.io/hpha-case-study
Frequently asked questions
Is report builder included in Totara?
Yes. Report builder is part of Totara LMS and does not need to be bought separately.
Can Totara's report builder combine data from two report sources?
Not in a single report. Each report has one report source. Combining sources means either a custom report source written by a developer or partner, or a reporting layer that sits on top of Totara.
Can Totara report on data from our HR system or CRM?
Only data that has been brought into Totara. HR import can populate users, positions and organisations, and those fields are reportable. Data that stays in another system, such as CRM records or finance data, is not available to report builder.
Is Zoola Analytics an alternative to Totara?
No. Zoola Analytics is a Lambda Learning product that reports on the LMS you already run. It complements Totara rather than competing with it, and it works alongside Moodle and Lambda Store in the same way.
Does Zoola replace Totara's report builder?
No. Most organisations keep report builder for operational, in-LMS reporting and use Zoola Analytics for reporting that crosses sources or systems, or that needs to be self-serve for non-administrators.
Can Zoola reports appear inside Totara?
Yes. The Zoola Reports block embeds Zoola reports and dashboards in Totara, with access set by individual user or by audience.
Should we use Power BI instead?
It depends on who the reports are for and whether you have a data team to build and maintain the model. If Power BI is already your organisation's standard, Zoola can feed it rather than replace it.
See what your Totara data can answer
No prep required. No hard sell. We will look at the questions your team is trying to answer, show you which ones report builder already handles, and if Zoola is not the right fit we will say so.
Book a demo: https://www.lambdalearn.io/schedule-a-meeting-lambda-suite
Talk to a specialist: https://www.lambdalearn.io/schedule-a-meeting-lambda-suite
Totara is a registered trademark of Totara Learning Solutions Ltd. Moodle is a trademark of Moodle Pty Ltd. Zoola Analytics and Lambda Store are products of Lambda Learning Inc. Lambda Learning Inc. is a Totara Platinum Partner.
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