Crystal Reports Vs RDA

jdetechie07

Member
Fellow Listers,
Question for people who have worked both on JDE ERW and Crystal reporting.
I wonder what kind of reports we can do in crystal vs JDE,
specifically for financial report writing, is the development cycle longer in Crystal ?
I mean we have things like Level Of Detail, smart fields and tabular sections in ERW which make our life easier
so I think it is easier(faster!) to create financial reports in JDE ?
I have no prior experience of crystal development so i may be wrong here.
If someone can share experience on this it would be great.
Thanks in advance.

Working on JDE 8.12
DB Oracle.
 
Check out solution ID 200997439 on the Oracle/PeopleSoft Customer Connect site. This article lists some of the differences between the two tools and where you might want to use one over the other. Also, if you go to the Knowledge Browser on the Oracle site, it has a section on Crystal.

Generally speaking, ERW is recommended over Crystal for financial reports because ERW has the smart fields, row/column overrides, etc...
 
We did rewrite our G/L reports in Crystal (Balance Sheet, Income Statement, various expense statements). I say we but actually it was a financial analyst here. The RDA version of the Balance Sheet (a custom version written by a consultant) took 45 minutes to run and killed our server while running. The Crystal version runs in 45 seconds.

I can say it would have been more difficult for me to write the financial reports because I'm really not a finance guy. For the guy who knew his financial stuff and was trained in Crystal it took him a week (it was one of his first reports) and isn't very pretty internally but it runs great.

Since then he went on to write all of our financial reports (budgets, expense statements, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Year - Year comparisons, etc) in Crystal with Drill-down capability . . . and he did it very quickly indeed.

From my point of view as someone who knows RDA pretty well and Crystal Reports very well . . . Crystal wins hands down. Its not really a fair comparison though. Crystal is designed to be a report writer. RDA is a bastard offspring between a batch programming tool and a report-writer. Its not really very good at either.
Crystal does GUI, E-Mail, output conversion to multiple formats, etc.
RDA does ... well - ever wanted to just get your company logo on a report?
 
Hi, i have been working intensively with both FRW and Crystal. The easiest way in Crystal is to setup formula fields first which do the work of the smart fields in FRW. Takes about half a day to setup once. From there you make formula fields which print on the report. In the print field you put a if-statement for the year and the ledger type and use the "smart field"-like formula fields. Further it is just a lot of grouping. Once you have your first report, the rest is simple. This goes for 90% of your reports. For your row reports and level of detailing: stick to FRW.
 
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