Come July 1, new tool will make financial reporting Crystal clear

General Article
March 6, 2003

By MATT BRIGGS

Administrative staff: how would you like to drill down in an online report to view the source of center financial data?

Or schedule reports to run at specific times or on a recurring schedule? Or export reports to Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Excel and Word?

A Web-based financial-reporting application called Crystal Enterprise will do all of that and more, come July 1.

Part of the new Financial Management System (FMS) project, Crystal Enterprise will be integrated with PeopleSoft, the Web-based information system that will replace the current financial and grant management system (SPOT), reporting system (BudgeTrak) and procurement system (AP/PO).

Initially, Crystal Enterprise will offer a limited number of reports, but further into the future, it will be easier to add additional reports.

Of course, BudgeTrak and AP/PO will remain available to gain access to reports for transactions that occurred prior to July 1.

With Crystal Enterprise, you will not install an application on your desktop. Instead, you will gain access to reporting tools on either a Macintosh or PC that runs a Web-browser with a connection to the Fred Hutchinson Web site.

This new tool will let you view data on a report and drill down to view the source. You will be able to schedule your reports to run at specific times or schedules.

And after setting a report view that meets your needs, you will be able to export reports to pdf (Adobe Acrobat), Excel or rtf (Word) formats.

New reports will replace the existing Summary Grant Expenditure Report (SGER), Detail Grant Expenditure Report (DGER), Encumbrance Report, and the Labor Cost Distribution Report. Other new reports are in the works and will be added after July 1.

Rest assured, you will receive training on how to use Crystal Enterprise via the FMS training sessions. Instructor-led classes will cover project reporting, sponsored project reporting and non-sponsored project reporting.

Watch future editions of Center News for more information on training. The class schedule will be posted on the FMS site, http://www.fhcrc.org/admin/it/projects/finsys, in the spring.

[Matt Briggs is a technical account coordinator for Information Technology.]

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