Microsoft Great Plains Reporting
– overview for developers
Looks like Microsoft Great Plains
becomes more and more popular, partly because of Microsoft muscles behind it.
Now it is targeted to the whole spectrum of horizontal and vertical market
clientele. Small companies use Small Business Manager (which is based on the
same technology – Great Plains Dexterity dictionary and runtime), Great Plains
Standard on MSDE is for small to midsize clients, and then Great Plains serves
the rest of the market up to big corporations. There are several reporting
tools available and you definitely need to know which one to use for different
types of reports.
If you are developer who is asked: how
do we create report for Microsoft Great Plains – read
this and you will have the clues on where to look further.
- Great Plains Report Writer (ReportWriter)
– this is built-in reporting tool. All the original report in Great
Plains are written in ReportWriter. ReportWriter itself is Dexterity
module. You should use this tool if you would like to modify existing
Great Plains reports, such as Blank Invoice Form - here you can place your
company logo, change the positioning, fonts, colors, etc. ReportWriter
will allow you also do new reports - simple option if you want to
export all the records from one Great Plains table - use it. New report,
however doesn't have interface where you would enter parameters - so it is not
useful for real custom reports. Another limitation of ReportWriter - you
can not do cross-modules report - when you need sales and purchasing info on
the same report for example.
- FRx.
This is excellent tool when deal with financial reporting - it works on the
General Ledger level (Balance sheet, P&L, Cash Flow Statement, etc.). It
also allows you to do multiple companies consolidation - when you do
consolidated Balance Sheet (with inter-companies transactions elimination).
- Smart List - Export to Excel
– this is nice feature in Great Plains - you could create a list with simple
criteria and then export it to Excel.
- Crystal Reports.
It gives you unlimited functionality. Obviously flexibility requires you
to know Great Plains table structure: Launch Great Plains and go to
Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Find the table in the proper
series. If you are looking for the customers – it should be RM00101 –
customer master file. If you need historical Sales Order Processing
documents – they are in SOP30200 – Sales History Header file, etc. Create ODBC connection to GP
Company database. Use the same technique as when you create standard ODBC
connection for GP workstation – but change default database to targeted
company database. Create SQL Query to probe the
data – we always recommend tuning your query and see that you are getting
adequate results – in any case – Crystal Report is just a nice tool to show
the results of your query.
- Direct Web Publishing off Great
Plains databases – yes - it is easy now with Visual Studio.Net and you can
hire good programmers. This is good - Microsoft Business Solutions
products: Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Axapta will be integrated into
so called Microsoft Business Portal - which will have web interface - you can
get the idea if you look at Microsoft CRM web client - so direct web
publishing is good taste.
- SQL Queries. If you
have SQL background - this is great field for you. You know - with
properly formatted SQL query you can realize simple EDI export/import for the
integration with legacy systems.
Happy designing!
if you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577!
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology
Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft
CRM customization company, based in Chicago, California, New York, Texas,
Florida, Georgia and having locations in multiple
states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK
developer.
Alba Spectrum Technologies