Report Not Found
Posted On: 12/15/2006
It’s interesting how reporting is often viewed as an
afterthought by IT folks. OK, it’s not glamorous,
and it’s not exciting, but to a large number of users,
it’s often their only view of the system. To them, the
system is the report. My light-bulb moment came
conducting interviews at one client. The user was
asked to describe their job. “I call up the 314 report
(published on-line to save paper), and look for my
projects. They’re usually somewhere around page
1200. I print of that page, then cross-check those
numbers with the ones on the 420 report. My
projects are usually around page 220. If the
numbers don’t foot, then I look at the detail behind
the 314, the 942.” This person actually defined their
job in terms of the reports.
When I hear that, I hear new Business Requirements.
A report is missing – one that compares two other
queries. And drill-down is needed, from the
summary to the detail. However, the implication
from an IT perspective is that data structures might
be needed to support timely creation of those
reports. Ask yourself this (if you know GL): what is
the functional purpose of LEDGER? It doesn’t
support any accounting requirement like “debits
equal credits” or “chartfields must be valid” or “only
the Fixed Asset Accounting Department can write
depreciation journals”. It is simply the sum of the
journal amounts on each combination of
chartfields, split up into accounting reporting
periods. LEDGER is a stored query. Obviously, this
is a common requirement, because GL also has
Summary Ledgers, which are custom summations
you can create, even using trees. Pretty cool. GL
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