Custom Reporting Options

Robin Evans

As I’m sure most users know, Blackbaud has been phasing out support for Crystal Reports so in preparation for arrival of the unified view and the eventual retirement of database view, I’m curious to know how those of you are working mostly in web view now, how you handle custom reporting.

For our batch coversheets, which go to finance, we still use custom reports that were development using Crystal Reports in 2017. As seen in the attached sample, the first page summarizes all the gift amounts based on the credit code, project number, & transaction code; subsequent pages list each donor and gift in the batch.

I have an older version Crystal Reports on my computer, so I can edit reports as necessary and then load the updated report back to the hosted environment, so the rest of the team can run what they need when they need it, but this is not a long-term solution. I suspect at the very least I’m going to have to make the case for additional monies for either premium licenses for my team (4 ppl) or create an old school process of exporting the data (once the distribution transaction codes are available in web view query) and then doing some sort of mail merging, but I’m really interested in how other users are handling custom reporting.

Batch Report Samples.pdf

Elizabeth Johnson

Hi Robin, Many people are turning to Microsofts Power BI, Google's Data Studio. What you shared I feel like could be done with Excel or Google Sheets. I know a lot of people will probably share on this one so I'll leave room for that. I miss Crystal. . . I don't recall Blackbaud supporting it beyond Blackbaud University but the community sure did support!

Alex Wong

some options:

• Power BI - great for executive dashboard, details report, validation report
• Power Automate - automation that can generate excel report structured as you want, mail merge into an existing word template, etc

Karen Diener

I have not looked closely at the report you are using for Batches, but I would start by discussing that. Is everything on that report still necessary? You might be able to use the Batch Commit Report that is part of RENXT already.

For other reports, I agree with Alex and Elizabeth. Crystal Reports is great but also not necessarily a future-proof option, so you're right to be looking into options!