Hi Folks,

I need to include monthly and YTD budget amounts in a monthly report grouped by fund category. There's 3 fund category groups.  How would you go about this?  Here are some of my ideas.

A) Create monthly and YTD budget amount parameter fields for each fund category, that's six fields, and enter these figures every month when refreshing the report with new data?

B) Create 36 monthly budget parameter fields for the year. Enter the montly budget amounts once for the year, then use summary and/or formula fields to calculate YTD Budget amounts for the month when running the report?

C) Enter monthly budget amount into a fund's attributes and some how pass this information from RE to the report using formula fields.

Any other ideas?  Anyone already done this and would like to post their report?

Thanks,

jwant

If this is a fund report or a gift report, it should be easy to use fund attributes.  I would use the fund attribute date to filter on the attributes in Crystal.  For a fund report, you can just do normal sums (assuming you don't have gift info on the main report).  For a gift report, you'll need to do running totals.

Drew

Drew,

Are you currently using fund attributes in this way?  I don't really follow your directions, "I would use the fund attribute date to filter on the attributes in Crystal."   What does filter mean here? Group or Record selection?  Coud you elaborate?

For a dynamic report, I imagine I would need to create a formula field that would extract the correct month's budget amount from the fund attributes.

If {fund.attribute.date} = (month reporting date) then {fund.attribute.description}

I don't know if this would work either, if I were to insert this formula field into a group.  I'm not sure how that would work.  It's going to require trial and error.

Thanks,

jwant

Our fund reporting is not this detailed, so we don't need to do something like this.  The reason that I recommended attributes over parameters is that you only enter the attributes once, whereas you have to enter the parameters every single time that you run the report.  Not only does that become cumbersome, but it's much more prone to errors, particularly if you are reporting on multiple funds.

The term "filter" is intentionally broad, because it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  In one case, you may want to do a record selection, in another, you may want to use it as criteria in an IF...THEN...ELSE expression.  It really depends on what you need.

Drew