[Marty Zigman]

We are looking for a way to produce an income statement that automatically knows which department the user is coming from when they run the report and then the report will filter the access to the data based on that department.

We don’t want to have to define a report for each department with the filter definition hard coded into it. That seems cumbersome and difficult to manage.

When we set the filter for a Department column on a financial statement, we can select “All”, but we can’t seem to select “Mine”…

We have created an Executive Reporting Center role for all of our management reports. But this role is restricted not by Department, but by user through the assignment of that Role to their employee permission. Hence, we don’t want to restrict access to this Executive Reporting Role to a particular Department because that would mean w need to create a Role for every department.

Is there any thoughts on this concern?

Marty Zigman

Prolecto Resources, Inc.

http://blog.prolecto.com
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[AmyExo]

We struggled with this as well and eventually ended up doing the hardcoding. Further, we didnt want to give access to all financial reports (as was the only option if we enabled *any* financial reports) so we created a new center with very restricted views to allow people to run their specific reports. The common suggestion at the time was to email out the P&L etc. on a scheduled basis but we did the center instead to allow ad hoc access.

Recently, NS gave a new permission on reports that gives you the ability to allow people to see a custom financial report even if they dont have financial permissions, which is a move in the right direction. The reports dont support -mine- and that limits their utility in comparison to saved searches as a result. The flip side is saved searches cannot be formatted or rolled up etc. like reports. So if they merged the functionality, we’d have a winner. However, right now I think you are stuck.

[Marty Zigman]

Hi Amy,

We pushed on this and I think we have a solution. Since we created our reporting area as a custom Workcenter, it was easy to create a new role that uses the Reporting Workcenter Center with a Department switch to use the user’s defined Department.

It appears to be working. Meaning, I can create one report without worrying about the department definition/filter. Then, I move the report into the Reporting Workcenter. For senior management, we let them use our generic reporting role (no department restrictions). For department managers, we assigned them to our new Department Reporting Role that has the Department Restrictions.

Same visual experience for both parties but the data is partitioned.

Let me know if this makes sense.

Marty Zigman

Prolecto Resources, Inc.

http://blog.prolecto.com

[AmyExo]

Marty,

When you say workcenter does that mean a new role? We created a new role and applied the dept filter- people arent thrilled with having to switch roles to see the financial reports but it was the best we could come up with.

[Marty Zigman]

We decided to create another workcenter and then apply roles against it. For senior management, there were no department filter restrictions. For department management, we have a different role that filters on department. The same visual experience, yet different roles for data scope.

We like the idea of a separate work center because we found that the day-to-day workcenters are polluted with every’s custom reports that have been clicked “public” or otherwise. Meaning, you have to slosh through all kinds of report lists and it is easy to get lost. By having a dedicated workcenter, we can tailor and control the environment to minimize confusion. The role switch is the price to pay to get clear you are

“going” to the reporting environment.

I wrote an article on this matter with a different twist:

http://blog.prolecto.com/2012/08/21/…-report-tools/

Marty Zigman

Prolecto Resources, Inc.

http://blog.prolecto.com

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