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Suggestion please? Crystal Reports? VBA?

I use Peachtree Premium Accounting 2004 and every month I export a Peachtree file to Excel. The file is roughly 45 columns and 500 rows of data. The data consists of monthly actual sales, expenses, net income, forecast and budget data by cost center, by account, by code, etc. I sort and re-sort this spreadsheet the end result of which is four reports, one per tab, of the same data presented four different ways - by account, by cost center, etc. and totaled.

It is a boring, stressful and time-consuming nightmare for me to do this each month. People have suggested I buy a third-party book and learn Crystal Reports or VBA to automate this process. Some people have suggested I hire someone to set up the process for me and say that it wouldn't be a big project for someone who knows either Crystal Reports or VBA.

Any suggestions here on what I should do? Would learning VBA or Crystal Reports be any worse than the manual way I do this each month? Thanks for any ideas.

Reply to
sbernelli
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What about MS access? you could import the data into a table and run your reports without a lot of reformating. Might be faster/cheaper to learn than crystal or VBA.

Reply to
Laura

It can be done with allbalanceslink

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Rgds,

Robyn

Reply to
robyn

While Crystal Reports is a good tool, I have never used it with Peachtree. I hve heard complaints that you only have a limited access to the data (The DDFs that peachtree distributes with their product only expose a certain amount of data) That may have changed.

I think VBA is the way to go. Once you export the data into Excel you can launch a VBA macro taht does exactly what you need. For starters, right after you expaort the data, start recording a macro of all your actions and stop the macro when you are done.

You can then edit the macro, which is all VBA to account for changes in future exports. This will require a good knowledge of VBA and the Excel Object Model. IT is not an impossible task but it is not a trifle either.

The other option is to use PAWcom. I have been using PAWcom from Multiware for many years (from the time it was PAWet) and it has served me well. I use it mainly to extract data for migrations to Great Plains, but i have used it quite extensively in the past to build a complex add-on application taht is still being used.

Thw advantage of PAWCom is that it ompports all the data into an Access satabase and you may be able to build a query or two that does most of your manipulation, and can then build a report on the query.You will also have full access to all the data. Again, this is not a trivial task.

I'd personally prefer to use Access over Excel for this task, but that could change if I had a moe intimate knowledge of the task.

HS

Reply to
HSalim

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