Crystal Reports is in our opinion one of the best industrial reporting tool, which has large number of report designers to do the job as well as Crystal Reports users, who are familiar with Crystal Report launching, sorting, grouping (expanding and collapsing, etc.).
CR allows you to abstract from your ERP application (in our case SAP B1 and Dynamics GP formerly Great Plains) and built the report in pure SQL data selection (Microsoft SQL Server view or stored procedure on the SB1 or GP company DB level). In this small publication we would like to share with your Crystal Reports design techniques:
1. Dynamics GP and SAP BO table structures. You can review complete structures in Dynamics GP SDK as well as in SAP Business One SDK. However, if your report is simple and you expect to involve, say 5 tables or so, you can quickly find the table in Dynamics GP: Tools->Resource Description->Tables or in SBO: in Menu select show system information
2. SQL Views and Stored Procs approach. If you are new to Crystal Reports, you can try report wizard, however if you are looking for professional reporting, we recommend you to abstract reporting tool from its DB queries through SQL View or SQL Stored Procedure (where parameters are translated into CR parameters automatically). In Dynamics GP Great Plains you can go ahead and create custom SQL objects in GP company database directly. In SAP BO, however Early Watch service makes its policeman job and you do not want to place custom SQL objects into SB1 company or system databases, instead create new database (SB1Customization, for example) and place SQL View or Stored Procedure there. In the case, when you have several companies in SAP Business One, you should consider using Exec statement in the stored procedure to build on the fly select statement with the company DB name, taken as parameter
3. Consolidated reporting. In Dynamics GP you have FRx Financial Reporting to build Balance Sheet and P&L statements with preset link to GP General Ledger tables. SAP Business One is very comprehensive in exporting BS and PL statement into Excel worksheet. We recommend you to consider FRx consolidated reporting if your business includes several subsidiaries, where you have mixture of Dynamics GP Great Plains and SAP Business One ERP and MRP applications. In FRx you can build and deploy FRx reporting tree to analyze reports by branch or consolidated by the whole organization
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