Reports: Ability to create own report

[Khman]

Hi, 

I've been struggling with MYOB for a while trying to make the custom report I want and finally dropped the idea.

To create a custom report: I need to open a prebuilt report, then select the field I want/don't want and then save as a custom report. 

Main problem is predesigned reports have a limited list of available fields to customise the report. And I lose time going from one to another to finally find the predesigned report that is close to what I need and then customise it. Even so, result is not perfect and I still have a lot of work to do on the file.

I would be awesome if we could create a custom report from scratches without being linked to a predesigned one. Then we could select just the fields we need, order them the way we want and finally have a real full custom report that fits our needs !

"Full custom reports"

[RBC]

Is there anyway that MYOB can have a Report writing feature the same as Customising Forms.

Everyone has a different way they would like to do Reports.

[DuncanS]

Eva,

A Cash Flow Statement is available in MYOB.

I find that many directors/proprietors find the Cash Flow Statement more useful/easier to understand than a P&L and Balance Sheet.

The perennial question by business owners is where is the cash?

This is often clear from the Cash Flow Statement eg profit might be $80,000 and Drawings $100,000.

It is disapoointing to me that Special Purpose Financial Reports (in plain Financial Reports prepared by Tax Agents for Small Business) do not include a Cash Flow Statement.

Every business is different and every proprietor's personal budget is different.

Accounting may be boring - understanding and advising on the financial aspects of a business and the goals of a proprietor is not.

Keep up the good work of advising on Cash Flow.  

[ASWatCR]

As a boring accountant! we always look at cash flow too. I agree with your comments and have voted for it. Thanks

[Tallie_M]

Hi there @Khman,

Welcome to the MYOB Community Forum.

The pre-built reports were essentially created to help businesses avoid the hassle of needing to manually extract the information they wanted. The ability to customise these reports were, again, to assist in avoiding the hassle of needing to produce a new report from scratch (i.e. allowing clients to simply make small modifications to an already existing report). Having said that, we can certainly see how building a report from scratch offers more flexibility to those who have specific reporting requirements.

Anyone else who would like to see this feature in the software, please cast your vote by clicking on the thumbs up icon.

[Khman]

Hi @Tallie_M

Thanks for the feedback.

I totally get the idea of having pre-built reports to ease the creation of most of custom reports. The main issue I have is that fields that can be added are sometimes too limited and I can add the field I want on one report but not on other ones. So I have to extract 2 reports and rebuild the one I need with Excel.

Keeping the option of manually creating our own report doesn't change the usefulness of how it is done now.

If implementing custom reports from scratch is not easy, maybe adding an option to tick on "Show/Hide Columns"  to see all fields instead of the preselected one only could make it - see quick example attached

[Mike_James]

I wonder whether you have looked at any of the add-on report programs? Since MYOB's philosophy has always been to provide a large number of standard reports, plus a small amount of customisation, this has been an opportunity for developers such as ourselves to create a number of alternative programs. I don't see the MYOB strategy on reporting changing any time soon; there was an MYOB-branded program on the market in Australia a few years ago, but it was withdrawn, presumably for business reasons. Supporting custom report writers can be expensive.

The add-ons provide a number of different styles of report writer, some in the cloud, some desktop, some point & shoot, some like ours fully scripted. Subscribing to a selection of add-ons for a trial period would give you an idea of their usefulness to your business.

See https://www.myob.com/au/addons/ for more details.

[Khman]

@Mike_James

Sorry for the late reply, I don't log-in often.

It's true I never checked the add-on report programs (why would I had a look at paid add-on?) and I'm new to MYOB so I'm not fully aware of their past and actual phylosophy.

My issue is the limited list of fields when trying to make a custom report from an existing report. I don't want to spend time trying to start from different reports until I finally find one with the fields I need. So my idea is:

- either we can create reports from scratches

- either we can access all fields - not only the one preselected by MYOB - in a way or another so we can do what we want/need from any pre-existing report.

[okcorale]

It would be beneficial if all data fields are available for selection in the reports module.  We utilise most data fields in the inventory and card files. We have over 2000 card files and 6000 inventory items and rising. The limited information we can get through the reporting module is causing extra unnecessay workloads.

[DanT]

I agree, there should be no downside to making the custom report options able to reference all fields.  I have been trying to ad a single field which was available in Quickbooks (ship to address) due to the MYOB limitation in a card file of only 5 address entries.  This does not support customers that have more than 5 addresses which results in needing to use another card for each individual address.  By doing this it's impossible to have a report which you can filter/sort by delivery address

[Jennifer_Kelly]

Hi @okcorale and @DanT

To be able to access most of the fields from an Item, Customer and Supplier card and from invoices themselves to use in your reporting, to filter and sumarise by can I suggesst that you look at some of the Advanced Reproting Addon solutions - https://www.myob.com/au/addons/

A number of these solutions will definitely help open up your MYOB data for more flexible and automated reporting.

As an example our Business Intelligence solution BI4Cloud lets you report on Item Sales while accessing fileds including:

• Customer State, Country, Custom Lists & Fields, Salesperson, Last Sales Date etc
• Item Custom Lists & Fields, Average and Standard cost
• Supplier Custom Lists & Fields,
• Invoice - Ship to address, Referal source, Customer PO, Invoice Memo, Salesperson
• Sales reports incluce $Sales, Qty, Gross Profit & margin by most of the above fields
• Transactions by day, week, quarter year and running over all prior year data for use in comparisons

These fields can all be accessed in the one report covering elements like the Type or location of customers v the type of product, brands v the Salesperson selling them.

Some examples of how clients us BI4Cloud to solve a common problem - Which Customers have stopped buying

Most of these reports are prebuilt and are available as soon as you connect up BI4Cloud. All details and a 14 day free trial are available at bi4cloud.com.

I hope this helps

Jennifer Kelly CA

02 8011 1511

BI4cloud