Billing Productivity
VegasJoe's enthusiastic response to my "Crystal Reports" blurb yesterday has encouraged me to wax rhapsodic about my job. I write reports. I am learning new software. I LOVE Crystal Reports. It does so many things, and it is all self-contained. Of course, if I wanted things to be really fast I could write stored procedures to generate the table and then pull the data out, but most of the time it works just fine to have the report do the query, with the grouping pushed down to the server if at all possible, and then I get to write formulae and make them look all pretty and make charts.
I am creating a billing productivity report that shows how many invoices each biller/collector created during a given week, with a % for the month and a total. The idea is that even though the service date ends on 2/3, they don't bill until 2/28 because...well, they don't want to work all month when they could just goof off for three weeks and work hard for one. I'm not saying this is what happens, just that if it does, my report will show that.
It has taken a long time, mostly because it has lots of little formulae, and also because I had to figure out a way to determine what week a particular day falls in. And then I decided that I don't like my date selection parameters (because if they select a date range longer than a month, they'll get garbage). So, I am fixing that, and trying to figure out how to get the description of a parameter (vs. the parameter itself) into a variable for the subtitle.
Oodles of fun. I have high expectations of doing ever more interesting things with linked subreports, etc. Maybe I can even learn to do stuff on the web.
I am creating a billing productivity report that shows how many invoices each biller/collector created during a given week, with a % for the month and a total. The idea is that even though the service date ends on 2/3, they don't bill until 2/28 because...well, they don't want to work all month when they could just goof off for three weeks and work hard for one. I'm not saying this is what happens, just that if it does, my report will show that.
It has taken a long time, mostly because it has lots of little formulae, and also because I had to figure out a way to determine what week a particular day falls in. And then I decided that I don't like my date selection parameters (because if they select a date range longer than a month, they'll get garbage). So, I am fixing that, and trying to figure out how to get the description of a parameter (vs. the parameter itself) into a variable for the subtitle.
Oodles of fun. I have high expectations of doing ever more interesting things with linked subreports, etc. Maybe I can even learn to do stuff on the web.
3 Comments:
I always enjoyed the display part. I write code to capture tons of information, but end up giving back very little. When I have time I like to create, as you do, usefull reports that tell people things that should help them with their job (or at least the managers).
But yup, next step for you is active server pages so management can be anywhere and request that stuff over the web.
The average number of days is going to require quite a bit more coding than I thought. Need to eliminate the extremes.
You know, if you ever get laid off again, you should think about bidding on projects on getacoder and/or eLance. There is usually quite a bit of Crystal Reports work out there waiting for folks to bid on it...
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