Crystal Reports makes data mining easy and produces useful reports
May 09, 2016
Crystal Reports makes data mining easy and produces useful reports
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports allows us to mine a wide variety of data from our accounting system and other data bases and turn it into valuable reports. If you know a little bit about data it's relatively easy to pick out the data you want, sort it, relate it to other data, run all sorts of calculations on it and turn it into a nicely formatted report. We even have a couple of reports that makes graphs out of the data. We use the reports for inventory control, sales analysis, all kinds of accounting reports, etc.
- Our accounting system has details of each invoice. We take that data and manipulate it to produce a report for each of our sales reps each month that summarizes the activity for each of their customers for the current month and the previous 12 months so they can see trends. Also every quarter we send the reps a report with a product by product listing of what each customer has bought.
- Actually all of the printouts in our accounting system are generated by Crystal Reports - invoices, checks, financial reports, etc.
- Crystal Reports is so widely used that when you run into something you don't know how to do there are all sorts of answers available on the internet. Last week I learned how to make a report for a running 12 month period based on the current date without having to input start and end dates.
- Our sales reports are done in one run for all sales reps and then I pass them through some third party software to burst them for each rep and email them to the reps. It takes less than 1 minute to run, burst and email about 40 reports. It might be nice if that capability was built into Crystal Reports.
We've done some things in MS Excel and Access but if you've already got the data in a database Crystal Reports is the way to go.