On the evolution-talk mailing list, there often comes up discussions about reports and how one bureau can't find the same report another bureau has mentioned. I hope to clear some of this up.
As far as I understand, there are three kinds of reports in Evolution:
- "S" reports (universal)
- These are System reports provided by Evolution itself - they are universally available to all bureaus, and each report has the same name and number everywhere. Example: S4015 is the "Direct Deposit Audit" report everywhere.
- "B" reports (custom)
- These are custom Bureau-wide reports created by a bureau and were manually loaded into Evolution; they do not come from Asure.
- "C" reports (custom)
- These are custom Client reports created by the bureau, but are attached to individual clients rather than applying to the bureau as a whole. These do not come from Asure either.
Creating / Obtaining custom reports
As noted, System reports are available to everybody but custom reports are not, so if you see mention of a B or C report on the list, you probably don't have it.
There are three ways to get a custom report:
- Write it yourself; there are several tools available for reporting writing, and at a certain point it may be worth developing report-writer expertise within your bureau just to service these requests.
- Hire it out; there are several excellent consultants who do custom-report development and are widely used in the Evolution community (Teri and Dana), and they are universally respected. Personally, I don't do reports stuff and have hired Teri to do this for me.
- Obtain from another bureau; some bureaus are happy to provide their custom reports to anybody, while others may ask you to share the cost that they paid to have it developed. Always start by asking nicely (privately) and be willing to dicker a bit.
I believe that in the past, iSystems/Asure hosted a collection of bureau-provided custom reports in some portion of the support website, but I don't know if this is still a thing.
What's in a (report) name?
Because System reports are universal, the same number ("S123") means the same thing to everybody, so it's fair game for use on the evo-talk list.
But because all custom reports get a unique internal number per bureau, the number doesn't mean anything to anybody at any other bureau; these are internal numbers only.
You might have a useful B123 "Customer Demographic Report" (just making this up), so even if you share it with another bureau, it won't have the same number except by rare random chance. They're internal numbers only.
So, if you're asking about a B### or C### report on the Evo talk list, always mention it by *name* and not by number, though keep in mind the name doesn't always have to be the same either; when you import a report, you can give it any name you want.