How do I search in a filter?

A filter is made up of two things. The columns decide what you see of each row; the search criteria decide which rows you get. This article is about the second. For the columns, see How do I change the columns of a filter?.

Where are the search fields?

When you open an overview, simple search is on straight away: the most-used search fields are ready above and to the left of the overview. Fill in what you are looking for and click Search!. Until you click Search!, the overview does not change — that is the most common slip.

Note that an overview often already has a starting filter. The bookings filter, for example, shows only future bookings by default. If you are looking for something in the past and cannot find it, that is usually the reason.

Adding a search field

Is the field you want to search on missing? Then add it yourself.

1. Click the Search fields button.
2. Tick the fields you want to use. You can search the list by name.
3. Confirm with the tick icon to the right of the button. The fields now appear among your search options.

Every field has a fixed type, and that type decides how you can search it. There are four main types.

1. List or selection

Fields with a fixed set of values — status, product, branch, payment method — show a list of checkboxes. Tick what you are looking for; you may tick more than one. If the list is long, use the search box at the top to narrow it down.

Several ticks in the same field work as “or”: tick both 10-New and 20-Open under Status and you get bookings with either status.

2. Text

For a text field you choose between two ways of searching:

• contains ~ — the value may appear anywhere in the field. Search for frans and you also find Franssen and Franse.
• equals = — the value must match exactly. Search for frans and you only find frans.

If you find too little, you are nearly always on “equals” where you need “contains”.

3. Numeric

For a number — a customer number, a booking number, an amount — you can do four things:

• equals =: customer number = 122 gives exactly that customer;
• greater than >: customer number > 130;
• less than <: customer number < 110;
• from / through: customer number from 200 through 250, for a range in one go.

4. Date

For a date field you give a from and a through. Stick to the format yyyy-mm-dd (2026-10-03). Other formats usually work too, but then you risk day and month being swapped.

More powerful is relative searching: a date relative to today, so you never have to update the filter again. You give a number plus a letter:

• 0d = today, 1d = tomorrow, -1d = yesterday;
• letters: d days, w weeks, h hours, m minutes;
• you may combine them: 7d5h is 7 days and 5 hours ahead;
• a minus sign looks back: -1w3d is 10 days ago.

So from -7d through 0d means “the past week”, every day anew. Leave one of the two fields empty and that side is unbounded: from empty through -1d means “everything before yesterday”. More examples are in Relative date.

Custom fields

Fields your organisation added itself simply follow their own type: a custom text field searches as text, a custom date field as a date. One exception: a custom table has both a number and a value, and you can search on either. See How do I search a field with custom values?.

Combining criteria

Fill in several different fields and they all apply at once (“and”). Tick 10-New and 20-Open under Status and also pick one product, and you get: bookings for that product, with status new or open. That is how you work towards the overview you want: start broad, see what you get, then narrow down.

When simple search is not enough

For the harder questions there is advanced search, with an extra button on the left of the filter screen. There you write your query as a condition: field — operator — value, for example LASTNAME ~ jan or BOOKING_ID IN (1234, 1235). It lets you do things the simple fields cannot, such as searching for an empty field (IS EMPTY) or for everything except one value (!=).

Which operators a field allows depends on its type. That is described per type: text fields, numeric fields, date fields and custom fields. An overview of all operators is in What are operators?. You find a field's technical name as described in How do I change the columns of a filter?.

Advanced search is a right: if you cannot see the button, your user group lacks filter_advanced.

Saving your search

Once you have the right query, save it with Save filter. Give it a name your colleagues will understand and decide who you share it with. You then never have to build it again. Combine this with a relative date and a fixed view and you have an overview that is ready every day. See Saving a filter.

The result is wrong, now what?

• Nothing found? Check whether you clicked Search!, whether text search is on “contains”, and whether the default starting filter is getting in the way.
• Too many rows, with the same booking several times? That comes from fields that can hold several values per row, such as options or payments: each value gets its own row. See Why does one booking appear several times in the search filter?.
• Date not behaving as expected? Check the format (yyyy-mm-dd) and, for relative searching, whether the minus sign is where you meant it.
• Amounts not adding up? If a booking appears several times in the overview, its amount appears several times too.

The full functional description of searching is in Simple search.