“Our ISV community is alive with innovation, and we’re committed to helping our partners drive the next generation of software experiences,” said Ross Brown, Vice President of ISV and Solutions Partners for the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft. “Adding compatibility for the latest Microsoft technologies helps ISVs to stay ahead of the competition and give their customers access to cutting-edge technologies.”

 “ChristianSteven is excited to launch this new version of CRD,” Says Christian Ofori-Boateng at ChristianSteven Software. “Making our application compatible with Windows Server 2012 helps us offer our customers compelling benefits, including intuitive user interfaces such as improved security and reliability features, tools to keep them connected to data stored on the Web, full support for multi-core processing, sophisticated management features, and flexible access administration to improve mobile working.”

CRD integrates with Server 2012 and Crystal Reports to automatically run, format, and publish reports. Using Microsoft technologies such as integrated authentication and SQL Server, CRD delivers a complete solution for business process management.

About ChristianSteven Software Ltd.:

ChristianSteven Software (http://www.christiansteven.com) is a global supplier of business intelligence and business process automation software to more than 1500 companies. Products can be customized and scaled to meet the needs of large multi-national companies or those with changing and expanding structures.

With locations in the USA and Europe, ChristianSteven Software’s professional personnel ensure that all products and consultancy services are customer-focused and will add quantifiable, bottom-line value by giving company decision makers critical business information they need to rapidly adjust to changes in their market.

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Products or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information, press only:

Johnathan Lucky – ChristianSteven Software — Johnathan@christiansteven.com 1-888-781-8966

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Without credit to pay the bills, small business owners must look to their customers for faster payment of goods and services sold. Unfortunately, the two obvious ways to accomplish this — reducing net terms and eliminating customer credit altogether — can do more harm than good, ticking off your best customers and giving everyone the impression that your company has solvency problems.

Even large, multi-million dollar corporations with plenty of credit strive to accelerate payment of accounts receivable, if only to reduce the labor intensive process of preparing invoices, sending invoices to customers, and filing invoices for company records. Take for example, EMPR®Australia, the number one replacement parts reseller for HP, Toshiba, and ASUS across Australia and New Zealand.

At any one time, the business holds $3.5 million in parts and serves 8,000 customers and partners, from end users to major corporations and government organizations. Even with an ERP software (SAP) and report generation software (Crystal Reports) in place to manage inventory and create invoices, EMPR´s accounting team continued to send out invoices manually via e-mail, mail, or fax. Averaging 350 orders each day, the process wasn´t just inefficient; it was nearly impossible to manage and track.

Ben Holmes, IT Director at EMPR, saw a better way. Using a business intelligence software to automate the delivery of invoices and tying it into SAP, EMPR®Australia was able to increase their cash flow by 50 percent in less than five months.

The automation was a welcome move for EMPR´s customers too, because they could now receive statements on their timetable — once a week, once a month, or the fifteenth of every month – helping them better manage their own credit position. At the same time, EMPR´s finance department can take action within hours after a customer exceeds credit terms by reviewing automatically generated reports.

I´d argue that small businesses stand to gain more from automating the invoicing process. A business intelligence software frees up staff to do more important work, compresses the time between when goods are delivered and when the customer is invoiced, and provides much needed visibility into customer credit lines and outstanding invoices — important information to know, given that three out of four companies surveyed by NFIB had invoices that were 60 days or more older.

You will find an article on the ChristianSteven web site that describes in detail EMPR®Australia´s accounts receivable challenges and how they resolved them with business intelligence software. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about the EMPR case study or how business intelligence can improve cash flow at your company.

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MARS is not only a Access reports scheduler, or macro automation tool, you can also schedule Microsoft Access queries. Today’s guide will walk you through scheduling the query, formatting it, and then delivering it to a destination (email, fax, FTP, SharePoint). MARS is a dedicated scheduler that allows you to perform Access scheduling without the need to fuss with batch files, coded .exes or the Windows task scheduler.

• First create a schedule. This can be a simple single query schedule, a packaged query schedule or even the more advanced data driven distribution schedule. In this case we will focus on the single query schedule.
• Browse to select your access database. Then select query export, and use the dropdown box to select the desired query.
• The next step is where you set the schedule for your Microsoft Access queries. MARS offers more scheduling flexibility; allowing you to set queries on hourly, event driven, by a customized calendar and more.
• Select the destination and format for your query. You can send the query’s results via email, SharePoint, FTP, Fax, or Printer. Moreover you can format the report as a PDF, Excel, Text, and more.
• The next steps include the ability to take snapshots of the query and archive the results as the query is generated. Since MARS has its own proprietary scheduling engine, there are a number of options around dealing with blank results, or errors. If the query is blank, or the schedule errors, you can be notified by email or text message.
• In the final step, you can set tasks either before the query or after. Perhaps a macro needs to run following the query? Or maybe you want to be notified with the schedule completes? Even complex tasks such as auto updating database records can be triggered along with the query.
• Clicking finish, your schedule is ready to go. No manual intervention is needed afterwards.

Since MARS is a dedicated 3rd party scheduler for Microsoft Access there is no need to worry about database locking issues, or dealing with the woes of Windows task manager. Moreover you can manage queries and reports from multiple Access databases, making it much easier for you to manage processes. You can also schedule Microsoft Access queries using MARS’ advanced schedule types. They allow you to dynamically populate queries, or trigger queries based on events. Either way, you will never have to put up with the headache of manual intervention again!

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Many hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities use Crystal Reports scheduling software to manage inventory. For example, if a certain drug is reaches below 100 capsules, then more will automatically be ordered, or an alert can be sent to the pharmacist on duty. A weekly report of total supplies can be delivered to procurement so that they are aware of what to order, and even track trends accordingly.

Real time alerts can be created using the event driven scheduler to automatically notify nurses, doctors or systems administrators of certain occurrences. For example, General Hospital operates several satellite branches through out the county. Each branch has to transmit updated patient to the main facility every hour. The event driven system can be designed to monitor this process. If data wasn’t transmitted on time, then an alert can be triggered to the systems administrator for investigation.

In many cases, prior to a report’s delivery, data must be verified. Crystal Reports scheduling software combined with an event driven engine can perform “checks” for data prior to the reports distribution. This ensures that no report is sent unless the data is valid and up to date. Savvy administrators can combine this concept into a larger business process. For example, the scheduler first triggers an ETL package, then verifies that the data is present. Next comes the report, and is delivered to its recipients. The scheduler verifies that the report was delivered to the users. If the report was not delivered, then notify the administrator.

The applications for Crystal Reports scheduling software and event driven systems are endless. The need will of course vary between different healthcare organizations, but there will always be a common denominator; the need to distribute information as quickly and accurately as possible.

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4 Report Generation Tool “DON’Ts” 

1) Never be rigid and non-adaptable. A report generation tool should be able to conform it its user’s needs. No business is exactly the same, and every firm needs software that can accomplish it’s goals according to their processes or procedures. For example, if a firm has Crystal reports that they frequently change, however the report generator software they use does not refresh the report automatically. This forces the firm to constantly rebuild that instance of the report in their reporting server, costing unnecessary time. Software that is adaptable often maintains a close relationship with its developers and customers, meaning that the tool is often customized for each user.

2) Don’t sunset platforms too soon. Businesses often house different systems of varying ages. Some machines may be running Windows Server 2012, while other systems are still using Windows XP. Many firms abandon support for certain platforms while there are still many businesses using older technology. Granted for the sake of technological progress, no software can support older systems indefinitely. However many businesses cannot upgrade these systems due to cost or other dependent systems. For example, a manufacturing ERP system that is nearly ten years old still runs on Windows XP. The business requires an updated report generation tool that can work with this older operating system. Upgrading the ERP system is out of the question as it could cost the business far more than the benefit of an automated report generator can provide.

3) Don’t forget about design. Business to business commerce often forgets about aesthetics in its products. Since firms focus on substance more so than style, they way software looks is often put on the back burner. Report generator software should be intuitive, easy to navigate, and yes, pleasing to look at. Software that looks too dated, or out of place will not motivate users to use it. Firms that procure software that is difficult to use, or doesn’t look like it is robust or powerful can send the wrong message to internal and external stakeholders.

4) Never assume that every user is an expert. Just because a user Crystal Reports guru doesn't mean they are a wiz at any piece of technology. Accompanying aesthetics, software needs to make sense, and be relatively easy to understand. Report generator software needs require as little training as possible for users to accomplish tasks. Preferably, users should not even need to understand SQL or coding to generate or schedule reports. Documentation needs to be clear and detailed. There should even be videos walking both administrators and users through configuring and using the software. Businesses already spend large amounts of time and money on training and initially deploying software. Money as well as headaches are saved when a report generation tool is easy to understand and configure.

Using these 4 report generation tool “DON’Ts” will help businesses choose the correct software for their needs. In case you missed part 1 of this article, you can find it here. If you would like to learn more about reporting tools, visit www.christiansteven.com.

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You can also publish MS SQL reports, schedule report processing, or access reports on-demand. SSRS automation software also helps you to create ad hoc reports based on predefined models, and to interactively explore data within the model. You may choose different viewing formats, export reports to other applications, and subscribe to published reports. The reports created by SSRS can be also be viewed over a web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site. 

SQL Services Reporting Services is a server based SQL reporting system that offers comprehensive reporting functionality for a variety of data sources. It includes a complete set of tools that can be used in the generation, management and delivery of MS SQL reports. SQL-RD is quick to set up and simple to use and can eliminate repetitive tasks and manual processes. You can also write and execute complex business process automation scripts or macros using SQL-RD’s custom tasks. To use SQL-RD, you simply have to set up a schedule for the time, day, month for the report to be run and specify the required format for the output. SQL-RD gives you the flexibility to select formats such as MS Word, MS Excel, HTML, RTF, Acrobat or text. 

Devised to support different reporting requirements, SQL-RD offers a very strong scheduling platform. The management of SQL Services Reporting Services becomes simple with SQL-RD and it can be tailored to suit a variety of reporting needs. It saves time and money by helping you to schedule and regulate MS SQL reports on numerous servers from a single application. It can also export or send the reports to multiple printers, file transfer protocol, email folders, fax and mobile devices. 

When business process management and quality control is important for an organization, it needs to use effective tools to infuse more efficiency in the daily operations. SQL-RD can make it simple to manage critical business reports. Other automation tools include the Crystal report scheduler and the MS Access report scheduler. To know more about SQL Reporting Services and SQL-RD, simply visit: http://www.christiansteven.com/solutions/sql-rd/

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