Why two reportwriters? I get this question often.
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. [click to continue…]
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