Crystal Reportsand Aloha POS Data

[soustech]

Were running Aloha 6.4.37 and it has a menu choice under Reports for Crystal Reports.

First what version of Crystal Reports can one use with Aloha BOH

Second is their a manual that shows one how to use it.

Third when I try to create some of my own reports for a specific range of dates,
I get one of several different error messages.

1. Data file not found. ( That's strange as I have all the data files for the last 3 years.)
2. .dll file is missing ( but it does not tell me the name of the dll file

Is their a crystal reports runtime that I need and if so where do I find it on the Aloha install CD

What I am trying to do.

I want to get for auditing purposes all of our sales transactions for a specific range of dates.
I need to be able to input (import) the data either into Excel or Access or another Data Base for Analysis

It would be great to be able to get all the sales by line item by server and likewise for the payments and for any Comps or Discounts. Then to be able to view this data and create my own customer analysis reports by item sold, table utilized,
server utilized, time of day, date, check number, type of payment, promotion used if any, etc.

The reports currently in our Aloha BOH are somewhat limiting and not detailed enough.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance
SousTech

 

[IndexRobert]

You need Crystal 8.5. It doesn't seem to work with other versions of crystal. Also, it will be extremely difficult to build reports over multiple days. We never managed to get this working well without an RDB, of which support has been dropped in 6.7. I guess you could still tie it to Access (6.4 still supports that as far as I know) and create reports there. Not sure if that breaks though when you upgrade to 6.7.

Our company had to build a reporting framework for Aloha where all data automatically gets pushed to a local SQL Express DB and we can build our own reports in MS Reporting Services to be able to create custom reports easily.

 

[pmegan]

I'm a Micros guy so can't help with Aloha specific questions, but I've written hundreds of report and data exports, and the basic concept is the same regardless of the POS. If you're looking to extract data and import it into another data source you may be better off just writing a data dump through SQL, (I can't see a major play like Aloha having some form of database querying available). Crystal Reports makes writing & formatting reports nice and quick, but exporting them to Excel is always a mess. The formatting always throws in a ton of random columns and you'll end up spending more time fixing that mess than analyzing the data.