Sage 200 Report Designer - Reporting changes in Sage 200 Professional 2013 and above

Overview of the changes to the reporting architecture in Sage 200 Professional 2013 and above.

This article gives an overview of the changes to the reporting architecture in Sage 200 Professional 2013 and above which affects:

• Company specific reporting
• Customised reporting

Company Specific Reporting

In previous versions of Sage 200 Professional, you could store company specific layouts such as invoices and statements via the attachments directory. It was not possible to set up company specific reports and letters in the same way.

The structure for all documents (including reports, layouts and letters) has now changed to allow you to customise and create your own documents for different companies whilst also retaining the original default documents.

All documents are now stored in the 'reporting' folder.

Within this folder are three further sub-folders that are checked in the following order...

• company - Different documents per individual company are held here. This folder is always checked before the custom and default folders.
• custom - Documents that have been altered but used by all companies are held here. Where the report being run is not found in the company folder, the program will then look to find it in here.
• default - All default documents supplied with the software are held here. Where the report being run has never been customised in any way, it will always be run from this location.

The folder structure within these sub-folders are similar for reports, layouts and letters etc. The reports folder is then broken down by module so note how the reports folder structure is the same within the custom and default folders as shown below...

The default folder contains all standard reports and these should not be edited.

Example

A report is edited that is for use solely by one company. This company appears in System Administration as Abbey Retail Ltd. The edited report is the Sales Ledger List of Accounts report. As the report will only be used by Abbey Retail, it must be stored in the company folder as shown below...

• Remember, after the company folder, you need to create the folder structure yourself when editing reports for the first time.
• The company name used in the folder structure above must be entered exactly as it appears in the Company Name column of System Administration. Do not use the Database Name column or the report will not be detected.

If the report had been customised and was for use across all companies and not just Abbey Retail Ltd, the path would be as follows...

For layouts, the same principle applies but there are no sub-folders after the layouts folder. So an example path for a layout used solely by Abbey Retail Ltd would be as follows...

Upgrading from previous versions

When upgrading from previous versions of Sage 200, the same file structure as described above will be used when running reports and layouts etc.

Upgrading legacy documents

Sage 200 Professional 2013 and above does not contain the Legacy Report Designer. This Report Designer used different file extensions such as .srt for reports and .sly for layouts. These must be converted to the new report formats (such as .report, .layout, .letter, .label etc) before you upgrade to Sage 200 Professional 2013 or above.

These reports can be converted using the File > Import option within the Report Designer in Sage 200 Professional 2010 or Sage 200 Professional 2011 or you can simply open the document within Report Designer.

You can also use the Batch Report Converter that is included in the Business Partner Toolkit. This can be downloaded from our support site.

Manufacturing reports

The document structure for Manufacturing is the same as described above. The Replacement Reports option within Manufacturing System Manager > Settings has been removed.

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