Have we been paid for that delivery?
It’s Thursday morning, just shy of 10:30am and your phone rings. It’s “that” person, again.
That person who has access to the same data and reports you do but ‘can’t find’ the answers. The same person that won’t use the reports sent out every Monday via MyAssistant.
You’re not alone. “That” person works at every company in some form or fashion.
When we talk to our clients, one of the most common challenges they face is getting infrequent Sage users to be more self-sufficient in looking up the information they need. People just don’t want to ‘deal’ with the system. They aren’t interested unless the information is readily available and easily accessible.
So, a fast and simple solution is to utilize the canned Crystal report dashboards. There are a ton of choices, and they can provide everything users need without anyone having to search the system or pull reports manually.
How to set it up? To get the official overview, start with the Sage Knowledgebase article number 77232 titled “How do I view a Crystal report in Desktop?”. Then watch the companion video HERE. The video gives a simple 3-minute guided tutorial on how to access the reports and set them up for your users.
The Crystal reports you see listed in the video are in your system already, buried within the Sage data folder but 99% of the time you can also find them here: YourSageServer:\ProgramData\Sage\TIMBERLINE OFFICE\9.5\Documents\Desktop\Home Pages.
Once you find them, you can choose and use any reports you want.
A personal favorite of ours is one for non-accounting users who want information related to a project. It’s labeled “Comm Const Proj Mgr Job Overview (CR).rpt”, or in short, the “PM Job View”. This dashboard when paired with a few others, will save you from having to answer so many of those project questions.
It’s worth taking a little time to find the Crystal reports which give the info your team needs. Once you have one you like, go to Options>Save Configuration As and name it “Job Insights” or similar. Then set the tailored reports as defaults for your users. The key is if it isn’t easy, “they” will find a way out of doing it. So, setting this up this way keeps it as simple as username, password, job number, generate…
Here’s what the PM Job View report looks like:
In the screenshot, the items described in Blue are drill down reports to live data. The information in Black reflects posted data as of the time the report was last refreshed. Anyone needing to get any of this information for their Project would only need to click on the Sage Desktop icon, enter their username and password, enter the job number, and select Generate. It doesn’t get much easier than that. They just need the right permissions and all the info they want is at their fingertips. No more phone calls from “that” person.
Username, password, job number, generate – it really is that straightforward.
Tony Merry, Practice Director at ETHOSystems has a few tips on getting users on board and on finding the right reports to create the perfect project dashboard:
[embedyt] https://Sage 300 CRE Dashboards – YouTube[/embedyt]
