It seems that Microsoft Great Plains is becoming more and more popular, partly because of the Microsoft muscles behind it. It is now aimed at the entire spectrum of horizontal and vertical market customers. Small businesses 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 and medium customers, and then Great Plains serves the rest of the market until the big corporations. There are several reporting tools available and you definitely need to know which one to use for the different types of reports.
If you are a developer who is asked: how do we create a report for Microsoft Great Plains? Read this and you’ll have the clues as to where to look further.
- Great Plains Report Writer (ReportWriter): This is an integrated reporting tool. All original reports in Great Plains are written in ReportWriter. ReportWriter itself is a Dexterity module. You should use this tool if you want to modify existing Great Plains reports, such as the blank invoice form – here you can place your company logo, change positioning, fonts, colors, etc. ReportWriter will also allow you to make new reports – a simple option if you want to export all records from a Great Plains table – use it. However, the new report does not have an interface where you would enter parameters, so it is not useful for actual custom reports. Another limitation of ReportWriter – you can’t do a cross module report – when you need sales and purchase information in the same report, for example.
- FRx. This is a great tool when it comes to financial reporting – it works at the General Ledger level (Balance Sheet, P&L, Cash Flow Statement, etc.). It also allows you to consolidate multiple companies, when you do a consolidated balance sheet (with elimination of intercompany transactions).
- Smart List – Export to Excel – This is a nice feature in Great Plains – you can create a list with simple criteria and then export it to Excel.
- Crystal reports. It gives you unlimited functionality. Obviously, flexibility requires that you know the Great Plains table structure: start Great Plains and go to Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Find the table in the proper series. If you are looking for 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 an ODBC connection to the GP Company database. Use the same technique as when you create a standard ODBC connection to the GP workstation, but change the default database to the target company database. Create a SQL query to poll the data; we always recommend tuning your query and making sure you get the right results; in any case, Crystal Report is just a nice tool to display the results of your query.
- Direct web publishing outside of Great Plains databases, yes, it’s 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 the so-called Microsoft Business Portal, which will have a web interface. publishing is in good taste.
- SQL queries. If you have a background in SQL, this is a great field for you. You know, with a properly formatted SQL query, you can perform a simple EDI export/import for integration with legacy systems.
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