Understanding Report Design

It is advisable to take a structured approach to preparing a report. This approach includes the following elements:

This section is designed to provide a conceptual understanding of the reporting process.

Before you do anything else, you should outline the information you want the report to provide. The following sections provide a guide to making that outline.

Reports are management tools. Their purpose is to help you quickly grasp the essential elements and relationships found in raw data, to help you make effective decisions. For a report to be effective, it has to present the correct data in a logical way. If it presents the wrong data, or if it presents the right data in a haphazard manner, the report may slow the decision-making process or may even lead to incorrect decisions.

A good starting place in the development of a report is to write out the purpose of the report in a sentence or two. The purpose statement helps you focus on your primary needs, and it gives the report both a starting point and a goal. Here are some examples of purpose statements:

• “The purpose of this report is to show monthly and year-to-date sales by sales representatives, compare this year’s numbers to last year’s, and flag representatives whose sales figures do not meet company standards.”

• “The purpose of this report is to show sales activity for each item in inventory, and to suggest reorder quantities based on that activity.”

Defining the purpose of the report before you start is a critical step in the overall process.

A single report is often used by many individuals. A detailed, company-wide sales report, for example, may be used by sales representatives, the regional sales manager, the national sales manager, and the Chief Operating Officer (COO).

• A sales representative will use the report to evaluate individual sales performance and compare this performance to that of other representatives in the region.

• The regional sales manager will use the report to evaluate regional representatives and compare the region’s performance to that of other regions.

• The national sales manager will use the report to evaluate the performance of regional managers and compare overall sales to the current sales forecasts.

• The COO will use the report to evaluate the performance of the Vice President of Marketing and the sales department as a whole, and to project such things as manufacturing needs and warehouse locations.

Since each user of the report has different interests, it is important to plan the report so it includes the information each user is looking for.

Write out a working title for the report. You may decide to change it later, but at least you will have a title to use when creating the prototype report.

You may wish to include the print date, information on who prepared the report, a block of text to describe the purpose of the report, the range of data covered, or something similar. If you are going to include such information, write it down so you can use it in preparing your prototype. The information can come from a variety of sources, depending on the kind of information you plan to use.

• Information on who prepared the report might be drawn from individual data fields in the database tables used. If it is to be drawn from a database table, what table? Or, what combination of tables?

• A block of text can be created as a text object and placed anywhere on the report.

• The QAD Reporting Framework can generate information such as the print date or page numbers.

Do you know the type of database you are reporting from? Will you be reporting off a browse or a database table? Are you familiar enough with the data to find the necessary information? When looking for a Customer ship-to address, can the field be found in a database table? If not, seek help from someone who is familiar with the system database.

The body should contain all the data needed to fulfill the statement of purpose you wrote for the report. It should also contain all of the data needed by the various users that you have identified.

This step requires you to look at the available database tables. The QAD Reporting Framework allows you to combine data from different databases when you create reports, so you have a great deal of flexibility in your work.

• Much of the data in a typical report is taken directly from data fields. Which data fields will be used, and where are they located?

• Other data will be calculated based on data fields. Which data fields will be used in the calculations?

• Still other data will be placed directly into the report using text objects (headings, notes, labels, and so on).

Some report information can be drawn directly from data fields (sales information, for example); other information will have to be calculated based on data field values (for example, sales commission, based on the relationship of sales to quota). In your planning, it can be helpful to segregate or flag data that needs to be calculated from data that can be used directly.

You should take the time to get to know the data type for data fields that will be used in your calculations. Since formula functions and operators work with specific kinds of data, it is important to recognize the data type you are working with, before you start any calculations. For example, some functions require numeric data, while others work with only string fields.

While a paper prototype is useful regardless of your level of expertise with the QAD Reporting Framework, it is particularly valuable when you are first learning the system. With the paper prototype in hand, you can put your full effort into learning and using the functions, rather than into trying to design and learn at the same time.

To design a paper prototype:

2 Position the title and other descriptive header information, using boxes or lines to represent report elements.

• Count the number of fields being used and estimate the appropriate spacing between fields.

7 Darken any elements you want highlighted to make them stand out from the rest of the prototype.