[KirkMathers]

Our current month-end financial statement package consists of numerous reports that are generated from NetSuite and exported to Excel for customization. Human error and inconsistent report formatting are issues causing frustration for management.

I am recreating this financial statement package using Crystal. Does anyone have best practices and how-to’s that can be shared to create basic financial statements and ad-hoc reports?

I can see that NetSuite/ODBC and Crystal reports work but can be frustrating getting past roadblocks when they occur.
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[tansanu]

RE: Crystal Reports using NetSuite/ODBC

Hi,

The best you can do is to link all Netsuite records in Access via ODBC and construct a visual map of records and how they relate to each other. Then you will know how to construct any report you need.

Kind regards,

Dan

[savethepennies]

We had similar frustrations with the underfeatured and limited reporting available within NetSuite. We started using the ODBC to develop reports using outside tools and had much better luck. Even then there are some limitations to the ODBC that don’t make it the perfect alternative either. At present we use a combination of web services, ODBC, and a local cache of data to meet our reporting needs.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for as far as best practices but I can offer a couple suggestions. The documentation for the ODBC views is okay and helps get an idea of where to look. It wasn’t totally updated but it’s a starting point.

The previous post offered a good idea. Find some tool that you can use to explore the schema and determine where to find the data you’re looking for, where to find related data, and what other data is related as well. DaFT is a simple, free program that works well. I haven’t tried Access with the ODBC so I can’t compare. I did try using a linked server in SQL Server but it was too slow for me.

Another suggestion is to construct your queries carefully. The ODBC allows for more join options than through the interface but performance can take a serious hit. We found that somewhere around the third or fourth join query time increased a whole order of magnitude. Most of the time we could rewrite the query or approach the data pull differently to get around that.

Hopefully that helps you get started. Good luck.

[thathaway]

RE: Crystal Reports using NetSuite/ODBC

How are you accessing data through web services? What reporting tool are you using that allows you to do that?

[savethepennies]

We have some C# apps that use the web services to pull data or run searches and then use that data to generate the reports. So it’s not actually a report tool that is connecting to the web services.

[KirkMathers]

RE: Crystal Reports using NetSuite/ODBC

I will check out DaFT.

The Crystal User guides are helpful but can be frustrating if you hit a wall.

For instance, how do you create a historical balance sheet with the data in NetSuite? You can get a balance sheet as of today, but to cut-off numbers at a certain month-end date is causing me a problem.

[jwenzer]

RE: Crystal Reports using NetSuite/ODBC

Kirk,

Have you been able to correctly get Crystal to produce Financial Reports? We are also running into the same challenges you were with standard Netsuite Financial Reports and are pursuing the Crystal option.

Does anybody have templates they would like to share?

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