I have Peachtree Premium Accounting 2004 and need to learn crystal reports. Can anyone recommend a book one can use to learn it? Of course the Peachtree company sells a book on how to use crystal reports with Peachtree. Is it any good? Would any book on crystal reports suffice or do you recommend the Peachtree company's book since it's specifically for Peachtree? How complicated is crystal reports to use? I have some pretty heavy duty reports to design. Thanks!
Sara
Crystal is a very difficult program to master.
I suggest you check out
At the beginning, any program can be a little difficult to understand and this was my experience in Crystal Reports for Peachtree. I have been developing reports for Peachtree using Crystal Reports for over 3 years now and I have no problems in getting even the most complicated reports to work quickly and accurately.
You may want to post your queries at
Curious, what sort of custom reports do people create with Crystal Reports?
Here's an example of a report that help start a business and make a lot of money for a client of mine.
This guy was working for a really big interior design firm and he quit and wanted to start on his own... problem was he only had about $2000 in capital. After telling me about this problem, I suggested that he buy himself a computer ($800) a printer($200) and Peachtree 2003 and Crystal Reports ($600).
My idea was simply this: We told all our suppliers (both materials and subcontractors) that we would pay them only when we were paid. Our customers usually paid us in about 4 or 5 instalments (in various percentages like 10%, 30%, 25%, 25% and a 10% retention for about 1 year). Our agreement with our suppliers was that if a customer paid us
10%, then we would pay all our suppliers for just that job 10% of their bill.The problems were
1) The same suppliers worked with us on all our jobs. In all we had about 70 different suppliers. 2) At any given time we would work on about 10 - 20 jobs a month 3) So if you had 5 payments on each job, this would me we had to keep track of percentage wise payments on roughly 7000 invoices per month. This was going to be a herculean task. 4) On top of this we were also doing multiple jobs for the same client.So we designed one new receivables that showed us exactly how much each client owed us on each job -> This report is not available in Peachtree in the traditional A/R report format.
We also designed a new payables report that showed us exactly how much we owed each vendor based on the amount our customer had paid us on each of the jobs.
This client of mine is now the biggest interior design firm in Dubai and he owes his success largely to Peachtree and Crystal Reports. There is no way he could have done this manually or even just with Peachtree.
For cool Peachtree solutions and work-arounds visit
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