How to Improve Business Responsiveness with Report Automation

Cash flow and good customer service are the life line of any business. One of the challenges that any growing business faces is how to respond in a timely manner to events such as new orders (send out invoices/receipts) or new support tickets. With limited human and financial resources, small to medium enterprises have to be smart in how they can effectively compete with the bigger boys out there.Consequently, as the business grows, the tasks of processing and sending invoices/receipts/purchase orders can become time consuming and prone to delays and potentially costly human error.Fortunately, both Crystal Reports and SSRS Reports make for great tools to generate invoices/receipts as both platforms allow users to create reports that accept user-defined parameters that can be used to pull relevant information from just about any database. For example, a report with a customer identity parameter can be used to pull that customer's contact information as well as details of all their orders.In remiCrystal, you can automate your entire accounts and receivables  process so that new records added to your database are detected automatically and the relevant reports are sent to their intended recipients. For example, when a new customer creates an order on your website, remiCrystal can automatically detect the new record(s), run the invoice report and send it off to the customer; all without human intervention.Doing this in remiCrystal is very straightforward; begin creating a new remiCrystal Task and check the box “Use external data to run multiple instances of this task”. Once you check this box, a new tab called “External Data” will appear at the top. Go to this tab to define the connection to your database and also to enter the SQL query to use for monitoring. Once thats done, be sure to check the box called “Only run for new records only” and then pick the primary key column from your query results. The primary key column is the one which uniquely identifies any row in the table or dataset.You can then add your report to the task and if needed, drag and drop fields from your query results (using the tool box) into the report parameters, email addresses or even email body. Every time remiCrystal runs this task, it will run the reports contained in the task using only new records from the query.By following the simple steps above, the friction is your business processes is reduced, the business can begin scale without being held back by lack of resources, time or human error. Furthermore, your employees' time is invested in more rewarding activities.