Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations gkittelson on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Smartest way to report from many separate identical companies?

Status
Not open for further replies.

jollyreaper

Technical User
Jul 25, 2005
105
US
Crystal Reports XI, topspeed database, SoftVelocity ODBC driver v4.0.

Our accounting system creates separate databases for each of the projects we run. That's as it should be since they are all separate corporate entities. As for reporting, though, that makes things a little more difficult. Those projects are all separate entities but operated in similar fashion. In fact, the databases are kept identical, even down to the numbers used in the chart of accounts. Theoretically, though I haven't done this yet, I could create a detailed report for one company, point the system DSN at a second company, and the report shouldn't have a single hiccup.

At this point in time, there is no need to run any comparisons between different companies. The reports right now are strictly internal to each company.

So. I'm trying to determine the smartest way to create these reports. The simplest solution I can think of would be separate reports for all companies. Simple, but time-consuming. I could imagine Accounting asking for either a report that prompts you for the company you want and pulls the data at that point or one master report that rips through everything in a single go.

So, is there a direction to be pointed in for this that might lead to a happy solution? Thanks!
 
Have a look at the list of 3rd-party Crystal report viewers at:
At least one of these viewers gives you the ability to select (from a drop down showing all ODBC DSNs defined on that PC) the ODBC DSN you want the report to connect to.

Cheers,
- Ido

Visual CUT & DataLink Viewer:
view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.
 
One more note: if this is a case where there are multiple databases under the same ODBC DSN (a common setup for Microsoft SQL Server), that same viewer allows you to also override the database the report was designed against by specifying the database name in the login dialog.

Cheers,
- Ido

Visual CUT & DataLink Viewer:
view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.
 
All of these reports would actually be coming from different DSN's. I will take a look at that viewer, though!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top