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Report Writer

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office.quest

05 Mar, 2018 09:55 PM

I have seen several questions regarding an official report writer being added to MoneyDance. I too, am eager to have that functionality, as others have said, I may need different formatting with regard to fonts, indents, subtotals, data included or excluded, column width, and report orientation. Yes, we understand that we can run a series of reports to get the various answers we want, or that we could download into Excel go through, make the stylistic changes we want and combine and subtotal our financial world the way we want to evaluate it. We want to be efficient, the task of repeatedly exporting and manipulating the data the same way is not efficient. We ask that you hear us out, this is a matter of designing a report writer template for end users to define the look and feel of reports. End users do not expect engineers, programmers and developers to know what each of our reporting needs are, and we don't want a gazillion predefined reports to choose from. We want the functionality to organize reports how they make sense to each of us. Similarly, we want to be included in defining the specifications of the report writer so the functions that are the most important to us, as a group, are put in place first. Please only respond if you represent IK or you have a third party report writer that works with MD. Thank you.

1. System closed this discussion on 04 Jun, 2018 10:00 PM.

2. office.quest re-opened this discussion on 17 Jun, 2018 06:58 PM

3. 1 Posted by office.quest on 17 Jun, 2018 06:58 PM

   

   I believe this discussion is labeled "Resolved," if there is a robust report writer in Money Dance, I would very much like someone to lead me to it. Because, I am still copying reports to files; then opening them in Excel and make formatting and sub-total changes that I want.

   If there is a report writer compatible with Money Dance, please let me know.

   Thanks,
   Alisa

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4. 2 Posted by dwg on 17 Jun, 2018 10:48 PM

   

   I'm a fellow user.

   The tender software automatically closes a discussion if there has been no activity in it for about 3 months.

   Alas there is no report writer in Moneydance. I'm one of the people that would like one because of some complex taxation reporting we have here, but I am also aware that developing a flexible and complete report writer would probably be as significant an undertaking as developing Moneydance itself. Moneydance does not use a DBMS for its underlying data so that precludes the use of a third party report writer like crystal reports or even Microsoft Access even if the Moneydance data was not encrypted, being encrypted make it even more difficult.

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5. 3 Posted by office.quest on 20 Jun, 2018 03:31 AM

   

   I want to be able to at least be able to create a report, using only numbers and calculations that are already included in other MD reports.

   I want to be able to say, make the Header 4 rows, and put these things in it. Then to format and choose to use Times New Roman - 12, Indent and subtotal at this categorization level. I don't need new calculations just to be able to mix and match the data I find useful. Everyone looks at the Data differently, and has their own favorite measurements they like to focus on.

   If they calculate the desired values anyway, why not give them "field names" that you could create a report by selecting those "field names." It could be a drop box format, or some other way to select. The formatting and subtotals should be an easy thing to get in place, I would think.

   I guess we have to down load to Excel and go through and format by hand, sad given how much technology can do.

   Thanks for the advice and information.

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6. 4 Posted by Mike Bray (Quot... on 20 Jun, 2018 05:20 AM

   

   Hi office.quest

   I am a user not a representative of IK. This forum relies extensively on users rather than IK to provide normal 'how do I do this' type questions. It also has a number of people who write extensions for MD, for example I have written Budget Generator and Budget Report extensions to help me prepare budgets in a easier way (see https://bitbucket.org/mikerb/moneydance-2015/wiki/Extensions).

   I am considering writing a more general report writer though it will be based on the information available within MD. It will take a selected subset of transactions and then present them in groups/subgroups with sub totals. The groups/subgroups will be based on the information available in a transaction, i.e:

   Account
   Date
   Check No
   Description
   Category
   Tags
   Cleared flag

   If you are interested maybe you could list down the sort of reports you want to run.

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7. 5 Posted by Mike Bray (Quot... on 20 Jun, 2018 03:02 PM

   

   Interesting the Transaction Filter report allows you to select transactions on all of the things I mentioned in my last post. It even will total by the various fields. I would be interested in knowing what you think is missing

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8. System closed this discussion on 19 Sep, 2018 03:10 PM.