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.
How do you do that when you’re an accountant without extensive training on this one database? Answer: you don’t. You use FRx instead.
So now all you do is open FRx, open a row (that feels a lot like Excel), enter your account descriptions, and drop down a box that contains your account numbers. (Actually there’s a much faster way, but humor me!) Open a column and specify (again with a dropdown) whether you want descriptions, amounts from the GL, and whether those amounts are current or year to date, or actual vs. budget. So the accountant, instead of having to figure out where these pieces live in the database, simply chooses them from a dropdown box in FRx.
Even if you do know the database inside out, the joins and index and everything else, financial report creation is much more difficult in Crystal and much harder to maintain when changes are needed.
Let me put this another way. I personally know both Crystal and FRx. I can work on FRx across all product lines, meaning on all 50 or so GLs it connects to. That’s because FRx has done the work of connecting to the database behind the scenes. Can I work on Crystal on all those 50 databases? No way. I am familiar with ONE of those databases and that’s the only one I would ever attempt to use Crystal on. Would I ever attempt to create financials with Crystal even knowing the database? No way. Throwing my time and your money away.
Bottom line, the two products are complementary and live happily together. FRx is the industry standard (for the midmarket) for financial reporting. Crystal does everything else, and does it quite well. Don’t even think about using it in place of FRx. You will lose a lot of time and come up empty-handed!
In FRx (specifically w/ Dynamics SL), the transaction attribute in the column format can be used to display a user field. One of the userfields is numeric. Do you know if there is a way to see this field in total at the Financial report level? Right now, I can obviously see the values in this field only if I drill down to the transaction level, but this will only give me the amounts for 1 account.
If I try to create this report in Crystal, I know I’ll be able to get the sum of these user fields. But, as you mention in your post, the maintenance will be high. I’d be sacrificing the ease of creating the financials in FRx just to be able to grab that one ‘non-standard’ field.
The report I’m creating is very ‘transaction-based’, so I’m leaning toward doing it in Crystal. Your thoughts?
Hi Lyn,
If you know the database schema quite well, and how to exclude unreleased batches and unposted transactions and voids, etc, then maybe go for it. I used to know the SL database and this would be no small feat. Good luck with that!
That said, there is a product that will allow you to capture this field in FRx (and fields from other modules as well). So you have all the flexibility of FRx at your fingertips and you can knock out a balance sheet VERY quickly. The only downside is that you’d have a data mart between FRx and SL, so the connection to SL wouldn’t be direct like it is now. I think it’s a small price to pay for expanding your reporting options exponentially. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send you the information.
Good luck…Jan
Hi Jan
You mentioned about the back-end ease of consolidating multiple databases via frx. I have being using Frx for a while, just an amateur.
Crystal can present a summary of each database’s financial highlight in 1 report. I have not being able to do this in Frx. What i have being able to do is just to get A consolidated figure of all selected databases.
Is it me or is this a FRx limit?
Hi Stephen, yes FRx can definitely do this. You might review the online help on consolidations if you’re going to continue using it for a while. In any event, good luck!
Hi Jan
Thank you so much. I found the relevant help from your website and it is pure gem. You are a true frx expert.
I was going to design my report using crystal but I think I will use frx now. Thanks once again.
My pleasure!