Reporting is one of the essential parts of today’s business oriented software’s. It forms the base for analyzing growth of organization and on the other hand also enables us to track the client request-response which helps us in maintaining splendid relationship with client.
Sage CRM has come up with powerful reporting solutions to suit any business requirement. However apart from standard reporting that we perform everyday being logged into CRM, sometimes we may even need to have some out of box functionality for automatic report generation.
Think of scenario where you have an internal process implemented for sales users to submit the conveyance claims for their meeting expenses. At the end of month all the bills to be consolidated and then the two reports are required to be generated Excel (For Reference and corrections) and PDF (Read only version of report.). Both of these files are then to be attached in email communication and sent to Administration team for approval and disbursement. Yes this all is possible with the component we have designed.
All we need for this component to work full fledged is format of the report required and some views in CRM. This component works on two different levels as given below.
1.Routine process
This is the process which can be scheduled in windows scheduler wherein we can specify the date and time at which the process runs and the date period to be considered for reporting.
The process runs automatically on the date scheduled and generates two versions of report (Excel and PDF) as mentioned above.
Both of the files generated are then attached in email and then that email is sent to Administration team for further processing. Being on the basic level we can even say that the mail will be sent to whatever email id we set as per our requirement. This email address value can be set as parameter in Sage CRM.
2.Manual Reporting
The same process explained above can also be carried out being within CRM. Now why is it required? Let’s consider the example given above again. If due to some reason admin team didn’t receive email with consolidated bills at the end of month and now they need to generate it again.
The user from admin team can login to CRM under in his MY CRM section he can see one more tab. He can click on the Tab to see the screen with 2 date fields named From Date and To Date.
We can enter the date values here to indicate the period for reporting and click on Continue button besides in order to generate an email with the two reports in the similar manner as explained above.
The process explained above can be molded and made compatible for reporting on any entities in Sage CRM. As the report design is extended style sheet transform based we have a good choice of designs for report. Isn’t it interesting?