Reports – Windows into Your Business

Sage 100 Contractor comes, right out of the box, with nearly 1,200 system reports, yet some of our most frequent questions are about tweaking or customizing reports!  Most of the system reports were written with the report writer module that comes with the program, but some of the more complex reports rely on special programming to collect data or control the appearance of the report.  Most of report questions seem to be about these complex reports, ranging from adding or deleting data to changing the report selection criteria to rearranging how the data appears on the page.  Too often, we have to inform the client that the complex report they want to have modified cannot be changed because of the special programming in the report.  The only way to determine if a report is locked and cannot be modified is by looking for the Modify Report button on the report printing screen when the report is selected.  If the Modify Report button is present, the report can be modified.  If the Modify Report button is not present when the report is selected, that report is locked and cannot be modified.

If a report that has most of the data you want appears to be locked, don’t despair!  Depending on the changes sought and one’s tolerance for slower report generating speed, we may be able to create a new custom report that can collect and present the requested data.  Flesh out what your report should look like, perhaps in Excel, and send it to your Certified Consultant for an opinion as to whether it can be done with the Sage 100 Contractor report writer.

If the report cannot be generated with the included report writer, we have had great success using a third party reporting program to create quite complex reports that can solve almost any reporting problem.  If the data is available in Sage 100 Contractor, we can extract the data and present it in a format that meets users’ needs, usually at a very reasonable cost.

Consider also the ability to export system and custom reports from Sage 100 Contractor into Excel, where data can be added or removed and formats can be tweaked to meet one-time requests.  This is not an ideal solution for reports that may be needed regularly, but for random requests, this can be a viable and affordable option.