LifterLMS Reporting: How to Track Student Progress, Grades and Sales

Most LifterLMS site owners open the Reporting screen, glance at the list of students, and close it again. That leaves a lot unused. The same screen can tell you who is stuck, which quiz is too hard, and what a course earned last month.

This guide goes through the reporting screens tab by tab. It covers what each one shows, how to drill down to a single student, how exporting works, and where the built-in reports stop.

Tab names, column names, and labels are quoted as they appear in the plugin at the time of writing.

Where reporting lives and who can see it

Go to LifterLMS > Reporting. The screen has six tabs: Students, Courses, Memberships, Quizzes, Sales, and Enrollments.

Not every role sees all six. Administrators and LMS Managers see everything. Instructors and their assistants get reports for their own courses and students, and the Sales and Enrollments tabs are hidden from them. That is useful when you bring in outside instructors who should not see revenue.

Tab	What it lists	What you get when you click in
Students	Every student with overall progress and grade	One student's courses, memberships, awards, and quiz attempts
Courses	Every course with student count, average progress, and average grade	Overview figures, the student list, and the quizzes for that course
Memberships	Every membership with its student count	Overview figures and the member list
Quizzes	Every quiz with its course, lesson, total attempts, and average grade	Overview figures, attempts, and students who have not attempted it
Sales	Sales, revenue, refund, and coupon totals for a date range	Totals and charts only
Enrollments	Registrations, enrollments, and completions for a date range	Totals and charts only

The Students tab and the per-student view

The Students tab is a searchable table. You can search by name or email and sort by several columns. It shows each student's registration date, Last Seen, overall Progress, overall Grade, and counts of enrollments, completions, certificates, achievements, and memberships.

Click a name and you get that student's own report, split into tabs:

• Information: registration date, overall progress and grade, awards earned, contact details, and a list of recent events.
• Courses: every course the student is in, with status, grade, progress, and completion date.
• Memberships: each membership with status and enrollment date.
• Achievements and Certificates: what the student has earned.
• Quiz Attempts: every attempt the student has made, across all courses.

Reading one student's progress in one course

Under Courses, click a course title. This is the most detailed view in the plugin. At the top you see the enrollment date, enrollment status, progress, grade, and total time in the course. Below is a row for every lesson, showing whether it is completed, the quiz grade if it has a quiz, and the time spent on it.

Each lesson row has a Mark Complete or Mark Incomplete action. That is how you fix a record by hand, for example after a student finished a task offline. One exception: a lesson that requires a passing quiz grade will not complete this way until the student has a passing attempt.

The time columns depend on lesson time tracking. By default only lessons with a minimum time requirement are tracked, and totals are labeled Partial. To track every lesson, enable Track Time on All Lessons under LifterLMS > Settings > Courses.

Course and membership reports

Click a course on the Courses tab to open its report. It has three tabs of its own.

• Overview shows currently enrolled students, current average progress, and current average grade. Below that are figures for a period you pick from a menu, from Today to All Time: new orders, total sales, new enrollments, unenrollments, lessons completed, course completions, and achievements, certificates, and emails issued. Period figures are compared with the previous period.
• Students lists everyone in the course with enrollment status, completion date, progress, grade, Last Lesson, and time in the course. You can filter by status and search by name or email.
• Quizzes lists the quizzes in this course with their lesson, total attempts, and average grade.

The Last Lesson column is the most recent lesson a student completed. It is the quickest way to see where people stall. Our article on improving course completion shows how to act on it.

Membership reports work the same way with two tabs, Overview and Students. There is no progress or grade for a membership, because a membership has no lessons of its own.

One caveat on large courses: the average progress and grade figures are recalculated in the background, so on a busy course they can lag behind the latest activity.

Quiz reports and attempt reviews

Click a quiz on the Quizzes tab and you get three tabs.

• Overview: attempts, average grade, passed attempts, and failed attempts for the selected period.
• Attempts: every attempt with the student, grade, and start and end dates. You can filter by attempt status.
• Students Without Attempts: enrolled students who have not taken the quiz. This is a ready-made list of people to nudge.

Open an attempt to see every answer, the points earned, and the time taken. From that screen you can start a review to leave remarks for the student, or delete the attempt. Our tutorial on creating quizzes in LifterLMS walks through the review steps.

What you will not find is a per-question summary. To learn which question most students get wrong, you have to read individual attempts.

Sales and enrollment reports

These two tabs work differently from the others. They show totals and charts for a date range, not tables of records.

Pick This Year, Last Month, This Month, Last 7 Days, or a custom start and end date. Toggle Filters narrows the figures to particular students, courses, or memberships.

Tab	Figures
Sales	# of New Sales, Net Revenue, # of Refunds, Amount Refunded, # of Coupons Used, Amount of Coupons, # of Transactions
Enrollments	Registrations, Enrollments, Courses Completed, Lessons Completed

For the records behind those figures, go to the top-level Orders menu, where each order and its transactions are listed.

These reports only know about payments LifterLMS processed. If you sell through the WooCommerce integration, checkout runs in WooCommerce, so look for those orders and that revenue in its reports. Our guide to selling courses with LifterLMS covers orders and refunds.

Exporting reports

Tables that can be exported have an Export button at the bottom. It builds a CSV file that opens in any spreadsheet program.

At the time of writing, the exportable tables are:

• the main Students, Courses, Memberships, and Quizzes lists
• the Students list inside a course report and inside a membership report
• Students Without Attempts for a quiz
• a single student's Quiz Attempts

Three things to know before you rely on it:

• The file has more columns than the screen. The Students export adds email, first and last name, billing address, phone, and the courses and memberships each student holds, grouped by enrollment status.
• The file is built in batches. The export documentation says to keep the browser tab open until the download starts.
• Not everything exports. A quiz's Attempts table has no export, and the Sales and Enrollments tabs have nothing to export because they are totals, not tables.

A student export contains personal data. Treat the file accordingly.

What is not reported out of the box

The built-in screens answer "how is this student doing" and "how is this course doing" well. They do not answer everything.

• A lesson-by-lesson funnel. There is no chart of how many students reached each lesson.
• Per-question quiz statistics. No count of how often each answer was chosen.
• Progress by cohort or segment. You cannot compare January enrollments with March, or one company's staff with another's.
• Scheduled reports. The reporting screens have no option to email a report to a manager every Monday.
• Combined business figures. Revenue per student over time, or sales next to completion, means joining data by hand.
• Your own fields. Extra registration fields are not columns in the tables unless they are added with code.

When you need custom reporting or the REST API

There are three ways past those limits, in rising order of effort.

1. Export and use a spreadsheet. For a monthly review of a few hundred students, a CSV and a pivot table is often all you need.
2. Extend the existing screens. LifterLMS provides hooks for adding tabs and columns to reporting tables and their export files. The official guide to adding custom columns shows the pattern. This suits one extra field or a company column.
3. Pull the data out. The REST API ships in the core plugin and exposes students, enrollments, and progress, and recent versions add quizzes, quiz attempts, orders, certificates, and grades. Webhooks can push events to another system as they happen. This is the route for a BI tool, a client portal, or an HR system. See our overview of the LifterLMS REST API and webhooks.

The first route is yours to do today. The second and third are development work. Our LifterLMS plugin development service builds custom report screens, and LifterLMS integrations covers sending the data elsewhere.

Before you ask anyone for a custom report, write down the question it must answer and who will read it. If you want help turning that into a specification, send us the question.