Crystal Reports

[Guest JohnB10]

Any messages regarding Crystal Reports are welcome here. Also, did you know one can use a different report writer than Crystal Reports for Quantech Reports. For example, my firm uses Microsoft Access for some Quantech reporting.

[Note: This message was edited by JohnB10]

[Guest Jeannie Hagan]

The plans we administer in Quantech all belong to the same "Trust Fund". We have the need to report not only at the "plan" level, but also at the "Trust" level. Looking for someone to share custom reports and ideas with regarding: # of participants in each plan, distribution report, contribution report, expense, etc. all on the "trust" (all plans) level.

[Guest JohnB10]

There are a couple of options for running a Report Writer report that reports data for groups of plans.

(1) If you want to run your report from a Quantech screen, the only option I've seen is to run the report from the "Trade Reports" screen. This is the only screen I've found that let's one choose "All Plans". The trick (after you've designed your new Crystal Report, which is a big part of the battle) is to set the "report style" to point to the report you created (on-line help documents this completely). The downfall of this approach is that you'll need to keep changing your report styles for the various reports you run, which can be tedious. Also, you might not be able to run just any report in this manner and get your desired results (in other words, you've got to test it).

(2)Probably a better way to run a report for all plans is to compile your Crystal Report and run it from an icon. The downfall of this method is that you won't be able to use the reporting tables in Quantech's database (eg: rptPlan, etc.); thus you won't be able to use any of the Crystal Reports bundled with Quantech as a starting point when designing a report. If you haven't created custom Crystal Reports before, the Crystal manuals have a good tutorial. Or, you could take advantage of Corbel's Crystal course(s).

[Guest LoriWass]

Jeanne, we also run a group trust in QT. I've talked to them about reporting across plans and haven't gotten much help.

We tried running batch reports for plans in the trust, but that doesn't work. QT has told me that unless the *plan* years for all plans in the trust are identical, we can't run the batch reports (summary of accounts, etc.)

They've also told me that I can't use custom reports in batch reporting. (thwarted again!)

We use QT for all our DC plans, but about 60 are in a group trust. Those are the folks we would love to extract and run reports for.

Would appreciate hearing how others are working around this!

[Guest Jeannie Hagan]

John, thanks for your comments. Actually, I do run Crystal from an Icon and am able to pull in the RPT tables to work from the Quantech reports. I just went to the Crystal class at Corbel which was quite helpful in this area.

Luckily, all of our plans belong to the same trust, so I am able to use this method to report on all plans. I am in the beginning stages of customizing some reports as mentioned before.

To address LoriWass's problem, I do not know how to report on a specific group of plans. However, I do have some instructions from QT titled "Printing a Report for More than One Plan" that involves Custom front end and Crystal Reportwriter. However, it does state that you must have the same plan year. Let me know if you want a copy.

[Tom Poje]

using custom reports from batch printing.

it is not quite true that you can't do this. you just want to be careful.

1. make sure your custom reports are in a separate folder.

2. have Quantech report writer point to that folder.

3. give your custom reports the same name as Quantech reports. for example, name your custom report sumacct.rpt Even if it is just a report printing dates of birth. The system doesn't know any better. When you choose summary of accts from batch, it will (or should) print your custom report. Thats because the system prints what it thinks is the correct report. It has no idea you are fooling it! The hard part is keeping track of what your report really does when you give it a dummy name.

Deceit works great!

[Guest JohnB10]

Jeannie: How are you able to report off the RPT tables from a compiled report(icon report)? Do you first print the report for each plan from the Custom report screen with "Prepare Data Only" selected? Or, is there another way to get the plans' data into the RPT tables?

Lori: It is possible to create a compiled report that will print for only a subset of your plans. What you need to do is make something the same in Plan Specs for all the plans for which you want to print reports together. I suggest one of the user defined fields. Then, use the "PlanStat" table in your Crystal Report. This is the table that has the user defined fields in it (unfortunately, they're not in RPTPlan). You'll need to verify you have your table links (SQL Joins) correct. Next, use Crystal's "Select Records" button to have the report select only those records where your user defined field equals what you want it to. If you have more than one group that you need to print reports for, Crystal lets you change your select parameter at run-time.

[Guest JohnB10]

Lori: It is possible, but pretty tricky, to batch Summaries of Accounts for plans with different plan years. The trick is to not use QT's batch reporting feature or RPT tables. In other words, you would need to create a Summary of Account report from scratch in Crystal. At a minimum, you'll need the ACCTBAL (holds account balances for each participant as of the beginning of the plan year) table, the TRANSLED (holds all the transactions) table and the PLANDYN (holds plan info particular to a plan year) table. To get beginning balance on the report, use begbalamt from ACCTBAL and add to it all the transactions up to the start date of your report. The rest of the columns on the report (eg: contributions) would come from the TRANSLED table.

Note: If you REALLY want to try this, set aside some time. It is definitely a project, not a task. Also, if you're familiar with MS Access, you might want to create the report in Access, instead.

[Guest Jeannie Hagan]

Tom: I must admit my ingorance. I am a new user and obviously did not know what you meant when you said run the report from an ICON. All I meant was that when I use the RPT tables I am working under Crystal not Quantech and can pull in the RPT tables. Your question is over my head, so I must not be doing what you asked. Sorry! Good suggestions, though - I have definately learned a few things.

[Guest Jeannie Hagan]

Has anyone been able to produce a report that lists contributions by date, account, amount for a specific period - all accounts on the same report? I have discussed with QT and supposedly the only way is to produce a separate report for each account.