123 Report designer

The 123 system comes with a report designer facility and some basic training is included in their System Admin and Finance training. This will allow most new users to make simple changes to the default reports.

Invoices and Despatch Notes are likely to be the first to be modified as they are customer facing. The default reports contain most of the normal fields required, but as a result the default layout is a bit cluttered. However it is a useful starting point as it is a lot easier to remove unnecessary fields than add new ones in.

how to use the 123 Insight report designer

This video shows the basics of making some simple changes to a despatch note using the Report Designer in the 123 Insight MRP system. It will take you through making a copy of the existing report so you can easily rollback changes if anything goes wrong. Examples of changing colours, text, and alignments are covered.

If things go horribly wrong you can go back to the original version using the Report Association.

Copying and managing reports

Before you start to play with the Report Designer make sure you make a copy of the report layout first. We normally add a suffix with a version number, eg. _v1 _v2. Copy the existing report to the next version number. Then use the Report Association to link the report to the new version and run a couple of reports to make sure the copying has worked correctly. Do this before even opening the Report Designer.

The next step is to open Report Designer, open your new report, and make the most trivial change possible. I normally add an extra fullstop somewhere and then save. Back in 123 run the report again and make sure you can see the change, This confirms everything is still linked correctly. Many hours have been wasted making changes and wondering why they do not work when really the problem is that the file you are editing is not the one associated with the report in 123.

Conditional text and images

The Report Designer is tricky to use but when you get the hang of it there are more advanced features that can be used. A good example is conditional text and images that are wanted on the report, but only under certain conditions.

Typically this could be information that a particular customer wants on a despatch note or invoice. One example was a set of quality checkboxes required on a Works Order report, but the checkboxes changed depending on the type of operation.

This was achieved by creating image fields, each with a checkbox image. In the report detail section there is a OnFormat command that opens a script editor. In the second screenshot on the right you can see how these fields have Visible set True or False depending on a field relating to the operation.

Need help?

Customising reports is a key service offered by TailoredMRP. Even relatively simple layouts can be very time consuming for new users so it can be more effective to ask TailoredMRP to help.

We can also provide more advanced reports, like the conditional text or image example given above. Sometimes the field you want is not even available in the default report, which requires a new SQL query to be written to make the field available before it can be added to the report. Most things are achievable, please give us a call to discuss your requirements.

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