Scottie Blackmon
Senior Consultant – Sage 100
SWK Technologies, Inc.
Many of you are probably already familiar with Crystal Reports as it is used daily with Sage 100. Most of you, more than likely, also have customized Reports to pull certain data or a combination of data that isn’t available with the standard or “Canned” reports within your ERP.
Today I wanted to share with you one of the ways that we – the consultants at SWK – utilized functions within Crystal Reports that allows us to pull the requested data: Subreports.
Sage 100 Crystal Reports and Subreports
Let’s start with what this actually is – a subreport allows you to combine unrelated reports into a single report. In its basic form, it is a report within a report. You can combine data that cannot be linked and present different views of the same data in a single report when you leverage the subreport functionality in Crystal Reports.
Things to keep in mind with subreports –
- It is used as an element in the main report and cannot be used as single report.
- A Subreport cannot contain other subreports.
- It can be placed in any report section and the entire subreport will print in that section.
How to Use Subreports
Subreports are linked to the main report via link, which act as a pass-through parameter such as Dates, Customer ID’s and Item codes. These pass-through parameters tell Crystal Reports that whatever data or parameter is selected in the main report correctly displays or calculates the data based on these pass-through variables within the subreport. This data can then feed into the main report and display via shared variables and allow you to get data from the subreport and display that data on the main report where you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you are not limited to the number of subreports you can have on a single “main” report. You can have several pulling data from different modules, which can then be used for dashboard type reports that gives you snapshots of several different accepts of your company at once.
Learn More About What Sage 100 Can Do
As you can imagine, proper use of subreporting can open an entire new world to your report wants and needs. This is one of many tips and tricks SWK Technologies can provide to Sage users to help you get the most from your ERP – reach out to us to learn what else your solution modules and integrations can do.
Contact SWK today to answer all of your questions on how to best use your Sage 100 or Sage 100cloud software.
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