Copies of reports submitted online

Good evening fellow shoppers. I am newbie to mystery shopping, but I've been able to complete a good mix of 15 shops in one week across multiple providers. If only I had found this forum before I started, I would have resolved many of my questions this week.

Now that I've found the light . . . the one nagging question I have is about having access to the report I submitted online or obtaining a copy of what I submitted.

I find that a few of the providers have emailed me copies of my submitted reports and others offer the option to save as a PDF during the submission process.

But in most cases, I don't see my saved reports anywhere on my page. Is it not a common practice to save the submitted report online? I understand that I am required to save reports for 120 days, so any recommendations on the best way to save my submitted reports (other than manually documenting a duplicate report) would be greatly appreciated. Or if you can direct me to the likely place to find the submitted report on the provider's site.

Thank you in advance.
Boatshop

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2015 03:20AM by Boatshop.

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Different reporting platforms offer different options or no option for saving reports. Generally if they give a confirmation number of the report, that is what you really want to record so if your report gets lost in their systems they have some way to hopefully retrieve it. On the other hand, your narrative is usually the most time consuming part of any report and that is easy enough to compose in Word or some other word processing software to copy and paste into the report and save your copy on your computer.

Overall I have had very little issue with lost reports once they have been submitted. The bigger problem is to have a report crash in the midst of preparing it before it is submitted. That is when you will love yourself a whole lot more if you have saved your narratives in Word and can copy and paste them into the next try at the report.

What I do save on my computer are the scans of receipts, a pdf of guidelines or instructions if it is a new-to-me shop or company or they have a history of claiming you did not follow instructions when you know you did, and the narratives.

Hi Flash. It seems like the reports go into a black hole, never to be seen again. I didn't even notice the confirmation numbers popped up until approximately the 5-6 submission.

Thank you for the feedback. Keeping PDFs of the guidelines and instructions is a great tip! Thanks for the suggestion.

Feel free to pass along any tips for newbies.

You can "print" your final report to pdf before you submit it, and then you will have a copy. And not all companies provide confirmation numbers. I know that companies which use the Prophet platform for their shops provide them.

Yes, you are right Boatshop. For many companies the report does go into a sort of black hole that the shopper never sees again. In most cases that is not a problem. For the most part, on-time report submission is the most critical factor. For those 'black hole' companies, they will show in some way the report is completed or submitted. That is usually enough. Sometimes we want a copy to review against the feedback such as 'spelling and grammatical mistakes were made.' The others have good advice, use technology to capture a copy of the report before submitting it. Printing a '.pdf' file using the print function is a great one. Saving the narratives is another. A screen shot of the report is another.

Welcome to the forum and good luck.

Happily shopping Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut

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Copies of reports submitted online

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