Custom Reports
This video shows the process of creating custom reports using our software. You can filter through everything you need in order to get the exact report you want.
Building Custom Reports Without Programming
The Rows
Finale’s solution for creating custom reports without programming is based on Excel. The idea is that to create a report you start out with a giant virtual spreadsheet called a data set that has rows for all the items that may contribute to the report and columns for all the fields that could be relevant to the report. For example, if you are making a report to summarize all the invoices in a date range, your data set begins as the list of all the rows of all the invoices.
Another way to think about the data set is to imagine printing out all your invoices and taping them together one on top of the other in a long, tall list of invoice rows.
After choosing the data set, you select some filters to remove the rows that don’t apply. For example, if your report covers a specific date range, you’d filter out the rows from the invoices outside of that range.
The Columns
After specifying the rows in the data set, you specify the fields that you want to see in the report. These fields become the columns. For example, if you just wanted to see the total amount invoiced to the customers and didn’t want any other details then you really only want two fields: Customer and Invoice Total.
There are more details for choosing how the totals add up, but specifying the rows and columns like this is basically how you generate a custom report in Finale. Tallying the totals has the effect of combining the rows that are tallied together, which whittles down the tall list of rows into just the rows you see in the report. What began as a giant virtual spreadsheet is now the report that you see.
Formatting
Once you’ve defined what goes into the custom reports, you have the option to layout the information in a page template that you define to look any way you want. If you’ve printed an invoice or sales order in Finale, then you’ve already used reports maybe without even knowing it, because the documents printed by Finale are just reports that are formatted with custom page templates!
Using the fields provided, your business can create the necessary report and print it to keep track of information. See the video below for instruction:
Custom Reports Example #1: Total Invoiced To Customer
(Videos: See complete list of available videos)
Video Transcription
Hi, this is Will of Finale Inventory. I’m gonna give a quick example how to create custom reports to answer specific questions. A few days ago, a user called me and said, “How can I create a report that would give me the total amount that I’ve invoiced to a specific customer?” I helped the person create a report and that’s what I’d like to walk you through. In Finale Inventory, the reports are here in the lower left. So, I just click on a report, and then I would click on the nearest report that I can find. In this case, I couldn’t find the exact report. So, I clicked on something else. Prior to making this video, I created a blank one, which I’ll start with here.
To create a custom report, you begin with what’s called a data set. A data set is like a big spreadsheet, where every row of that spreadsheet contributes to your final report. So, since what we are asked to do by this user is to create a report that shows the total amount invoiced to a specific customer, I’m going to begin with the data set of all of my invoices with my item detail, meaning that there is one row for every row in every invoice. You can think of this like if you printed out all of your invoices and taped them in a big, long, tall monolith invoice that had every row of every invoice, that’s what we’re starting out with here. But then we’re gonna filter it. We’re gonna to filter it by a specific customer and a specific date range. I’m going to check these two little checkboxes so that whenever you run the report, it’s gonna ask you for the customer and the date range. So, you can think of it like I’m making a template that I can reuse again and again. Okay.
So, now we begin with the master spreadsheet of all of our invoices together to create custom reports. We then filtered out everything that didn’t match our customer and the date range that we picked. The next thing we choose is what columns or what fields do we want to show in our report. And this user really was asked a pretty simple question. He just wanted to know the customer and the total. So, I’m just going to add the customer here, make the field wide enough to see, and then the total is actually a calculated column because it combines the prices of all of the rows for this customer.
So, I have the total here. Invoice, items, subtotal, sum. Okay. Great. So, I’ll save that. Print it to make sure I get something like what I want. Okay. I’m getting a list of all of my customers here and the subtotal per customer. That looks basically what I want, so I’m ready to go. I guess I’ve already saved it. So, if I went back home and went to Reports, and went to Invoice Totals, the report that I just made, here it is asking me for a specific customer and a date range. So, I’ll pick the example customer, pick a date range of, say, May 24th through today, Apply, print the report, and there we go. The example customer for that specific date range was invoiced $215.53. I’m gonna follow this up with another video, which will then expand out from this report into a report that looks a little fancier and shows a little bit more information.