When it comes to Yardi, the goal of reporting is to provide the outputs you require, in the format that works for your organization, in a time-frame that supports your business needs. Questions such as Will your team need to dynamically analyze the data in the report? How important are report cosmetics? What programming/technical resources do you have on-hand? are crucial as you plan your organization’s reporting strategy.
Now that Yardi has begun to transition away from report development in Crystal reports, clients frequently ask what the best tool for developing custom reports is.
Our team has extensive experience in report writing with three current, standard approaches:
- Basic SQL/screen-based reports
- Yardi Spreadsheet Reporting (YSR)
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
Depending on your enterprise’s goals, any of these options could potentially be the right fit for your needs.
Here, I’ve broken down the pros and cons of each tactic.
Summary
If you require beautifully formatted reports that are printable at all stages, then SSRS is the way to go. However, that beauty comes at a cost. SSRS reports are the most time-consuming, and therefore expensive, to develop. They will also require technical programming resources to make simple changes. Considering that the format of SSRS reports is fixed, that may be a challenge for your organization.
The fastest and most economical approach is screen-based reports. The trade-off being that they provide data most appropriate for research and not for cosmetic end-user deliverables.
If your team needs to play with the data for analysis—slice, sort, pivot, etc.—using YSR to generate data sets into Excel is a great way to go. While YSR can also provide a formatted report at the first level, it won’t be your best option formatting at later, drilled-down, stages.
We’re curious to know what reporting strategies are working best for your organization and why? Feel free to share your comments and ask questions below.
