Is there a way to either specify a relative timespan for reports (i.e. previous week, month, quarter, year-to-date, etc.) or could there be a Clone button on the reports that could do this? (I.e. it might infer, based on the previous date range, what date range the new report should have.)
Not currently
This would be very useful - especially for things like Payslips - it would be great if there was a default report for all of these for every month, every quarter and for the financial year - currently I am creating 12+ custom reports setting date ranges etc to have this available - it would be good as an option for all reports - Generate Monthly - Generate Quarterly - Generate Financial year report templates in addition to being able to create custom date ranges…
I’m curious how you think those time periods should be defined, @Nigel_Matthew. Some businesses would want calendar month/quarter/year. Many entities have fiscal years different from calendar years. And many businesses define months and quarters for date spans different than calendar months and quarters, such as on constant, four-week periods, or alternating four and five-week spans. Other businesses don’t do monthly or quarterly reporting at all, but follow a biweekly payroll cycle for all financial reports. I could name several others just from companies I’ve worked for, and I’m sure I haven’t encountered every scheme out there. Even if you could customize the “standard” reports, the program would never hit every one.
I see what you are saying - I guess I thought calendar months would be good for the payslip reports as that is what we use but agreed others will use a myriad of breakdowns. It would also depend on what country you are in I guess as financial years will be defined differently. I still would expect there are some that are more common than others like monthly, 4 weekly etc but once you start where do you stop?
I am currently evaluating Manager for my business.
The issue of setting dates (and maybe relative dates) in memorized reports is very important to me.
One example would be to be able to easily call up a Profit and Loss Statement for last month with a year to date column - so if doing one today the first column would show the month of May and the second column would show January 1st to May 31st (YTD). I would not want to have to change the dates every month. I would want to be able to view the saved P&L and have it automatically follow that rule - Last Month and YTD.
For example - Quick-books standard date ranges are:
All, Today, this Week, This Week to Date, This Month, This Month To Date, This Fiscal Quarter,This Fiscal Quarter to Date, This Fiscal Year, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Week to Date, Last Month, Last Month to Date, Last Fiscal Quarter, Last Fiscal Quarter to Date, Last Fiscal Year, Last Fiscal Year to Date, etc.
Do you curetnly have this ability and I am just not seeing it?
Anything like it?
Any plans?
Thanks
Hi xero50,
Thanks for replying.
Looking at your report setup you would get a P&L with 13 columns all with defined date ranges - Nov - Oct plus YTD.
If later you wanted to use this report again and you wanted to start at Dec you would need to delete the Nov column, redo the YTD column to handle Nov 2017 and then create a new YTD column?
Do I have that right?
If so, that is way too much work for me.
Mine would have just two columns one for Last Month labelled May 2017 and one for YTD labelled either YTD or 1/1/2017 - May 31, 2017 and if I used it in July it would automatically change to a column for June and new YTD.
Possible?
Currently reports in Manager work on specific dates, not periods - current month.
Hi Brucanna
Are you a developer for “Manager” or a fellow User?
Fellow User
Correct
You do have it correct, but I do feel that I should say that it rather misses the point of using a layout like that. The date ranges shown in the illustration are basically for a year (my own financial year in this example), and so a few minutes spent setting things up st the start of the year then serve for the whole year without any further messing or further intervention from me in terms of set-up/changing parameters…
as @Brucanna points-out, reports work on dates rather than periods
Thanks for trying to help. I am pretty sure you are correct. I looked all over for some way to do what I need. Kinda hoping someone on the developer team will pipe in with a - here’s what you do" or a - we plan to add that feature real soon now : )
Is this the wrong place to try to communicate with the developer team?
No, this is the right place. As previously advised only date ranges can be selected and not period titles. I don’t suspect that will be changing in the near future, but one never knows.