Learned something interesting from a client the other day. They’re using 4/4/5 accounting periods, and for a long time, they fought the @month code in their column headings. FRx would often pick up an incorrect month from their perspective, although that programming is by design. Read More »
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I’ve had a number of responses to my ‘Life’s Too Short To Do Balance Sheets in Crystal’ post, so I thought I’d do one more on the FRx vs. Crystal question, this time a little more techie.
Why are there two reportwriters (usually Crystal and FRx in the midmarket) when you’re implementing a new ERP? Why not just use Crystal to create the financial reports? Crystal is a database reportwriter. The database that contains the accounting transactions can have a couple hundred tables (or more). To create financial reports in Crystal, you would have to know lots of techie things like which tables contain the data you need (and tables can have very strange names!), which field to use to link those tables, how to structure the join that links the tables, the field names for the data you need, and how the application flags items in the database like whether a transaction is posted, how to separate budget from actual, how to exclude void transactions, and a whole host of other things absolutely critical to accuracy. Read More »
So be honest, who hasn’t done this? You want to indent your detail account names, and you sit at the keyboard and enter an exact number of spaces before each name. Or, one of my old consulting tricks is to concatenate the account name with a number of spaces in Excel, then paste in (the Excel indent feature won’t paste in). But there’s a much better way, and here it is. Read More »