May 2010 Newsletter

Financial Report Writer Web Training

In addition to our standard weekly training sessions, we would like to invite you to a special session on the ClickBase Financial Report Writer in June. This session will be conducted over the web on June 16th at 1:00PM EDT. Click here to register.

The ClickBase Financial Report Writer is an embedded spreadsheet that comes standard with ClickBase. You already have it, so make the most of it.

With the ClickBase Financial Report Writer you can quickly and easily create P&L, Balance Sheet and other financial reports in a familiar spreadsheet format. Report templates allow you to select data from existing or new datasets and define date ranges to save you hours of formatting monthly and quarterly financial reports.

Since the Financial Report Writer uses a familiar spreadsheet format, there’s no long learning curve. You can replace complex reporting tools with one single, integrated reporting package.

As with all ClickBase functionality, the Financial Report Writer can access multiple data sources simultaneously. You can draw actual numbers from your accounting system, consolidate them with budget numbers from a spreadsheet and prepare a budget to actual report without requiring the IT team’s assistance.

Join us on June 16th to find out how you can put the Financial Report Writer to work for you.

Many Uses of ClickBase

Our clients use ClickBase in a variety of ways – from the complex to the very simple – to save time and use the information from across their organization to make better decisions. We hope to help you find new ways to use ClickBase and make the most from your investment.

The Marketing Administrator at one or our clients recently needed to send an announcement to all their customers. She knew the best way to communicate quickly would be through a mass email, so she needed a current email list to import into their email marketing solution.

Picking the appropriate fields from the Customer shortcut, she exported the contacts to Excel, checked her data and was ready to go. The up to date listing of customer names and email addresses was available to her in minutes. Simple, easy, fast.

Did You Know?

In the most recent update of ClickBase, we’ve included parameters that allow the user to pass data to the Select statement without the field being associated with any table in the Select Statement. These parameters are sometimes called Colon Parameters because they require a leading colon character at the beginning of the fieldname.

The first step in creating a Colon Parameter is to go to the Shortcut Group Administration and click on the Control Center Shortcut. A list with one item should appear on the right. Double click on the item System Administration .

Next, click on the List tab and select the Code Tables icon. On the right, in the tree view, there is an item called Datasets. Click on the plus(+) sign next to the word Datasets, and the item Parameter Types will appear below Datasets. Click Parameter Types and then click the Add button. Enter a Name, Description, Data Type and Type. For the name, enter a descriptive name of the field without the colon and leave Type as default. Click on the diskette icon to save this Parameter Type.

The next step is to add this parameter as an Input Parameter to the dataset. Either open an existing Dataset or create a new Dataset. With the Dataset open, click on the Parameter tab. In the Input section, click on the Add button and enter the information for the Colon Parameter. In the Name field enter a descriptive name for the parameter. Then, in the Type field, locate the Parameter Type you created in the Control Center. The Field Name will be the parameter name with a colon at the beginning (example – :Month). In the Default field, enter a value you know will work in the query so that you can test your parameter in the dataset.

The last step is to modify your Select statement. The following are Select statement examples with the Colon Parameter:

Select custnbr, custname, totalpaid, invoicedate from invoice where month(invoicedate) = :Month and year(invoicedate) = :Year

Select custnbr, custname, totalpaid, invoicedate, :Month as invmonth, :Year as invyear from invoice where month(invoicedate) = :Month and year(invoicedate) = :Year

Once you have modified the Select statement, click on the diskette icon to save your changes. Click on the Preview tab at the bottom and then click on the Execute button. It will now run with the Default values in the Colon Parameter fields.

You can also add this in the SQL Builder but to test it save the SQL Builder changes and then run it by clicking the Preview and Execute button.

The second sample Select statement allows you to include the parameters you selected as fields in your Shortcut. This is very useful in spreadsheet view as you can display the fields as the headers or use this data to calculate other cells in the spreadsheet.

Contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you have any question on the Select Statement with Colon Parameter.