I am really new to Crystal Reports and am trying to streamline the depreciation reports I have to create, so that they require the least amount of formula editing when switching reporting periods. (I'm using Sage Premium Depreciation FYI) 

 

Currently, I am the only one producing reports, but eventually other people will also need to use, and some of them are not very tech savvy (I'm not trying to be mean). These people have pretty much decided that they hate Sage because you have to enter more data in manually. So I really, don't see them warming up to Crystal, since it sacrifices a simple interface in favor of more robust reports.

 

I have been able to link the ending period date to all the formulas and headers I need by using "Current Through Date (Int)" with no problem.  However, I keep hitting a wall when trying to get the beginning period date to do the same.

 

The best solution I have right now is to manually type in the date in a formula field I simply named "Begin Date."  I can get this to then flow to all the formulas; and I think I have a few ideas of how to get this into the header and format it.  This solution would be good enough for me, since it only requires a pretty easy edit, but I'm not the only one using the reports...

 

I tried to tie in the "Current Prev Thru Date (Int)" field.  I had to use the 'mode' function to make sure that all the dates were the same; and doing this I am able to get the correct date that I want, but I can't use it as a reference in any of my formulas.  If I try to put the date in a formula I get an error saying "A summary has been specified on a non-recurring fireld."

 

Any ideas of ways do get the beginning period date that won't cause this error or ways to fix the error?

 

Thanks for any help,

Stephen

 

Start and End dates are based on when I run depreciation in Sage. So, if I wanted to get depreciation for 2013, I would first depreciate all the assets as of Dec. 31st 2012 and then do it as of Dec. 31st 2013.  It seems like an odd way to have to do it, but that's what Sage wants...

 

I am able to use these dates as the start and end dates for most assets with fields that are already being pulled through.  For most I can use "Current through Date" and "Current Prev Thru Date" to spit out the correct dates.  But this does not work for all assets.

 

There are about 32,000 assets in the database, and probably half of them have been disposed or are inactive (they still need to be in the database though). For these assets, the system either locks in the values of the Thru Dates that were calculated right before the asset was mark as "disposed" or it will have no value for these fields. I don't know if there is a way to stop these old assets from being pulled in as data, my current solution is using formula fields to group these assets together so they don't mix in with the data I actually need.

 

So, I have no database fields that are available to me which have a constant date for all the assets.  Since the date is not constant, I can't be sure that if I use it formula (instead of a hard date), that it will work the way I want it to.  That is why I tried using a formula with 'mode' to give me constant start and end dates, and it does give me consistent dates for all the assets.  However, if I try to reference this formula in other formulas I am not able to summarize that data in the report, and if I previously had it summarized the error "A summary has been specified on a non-recurring fireld" comes up.

 

I will try to come up with a sample of data that will be helpful, but I will need to find some examples of assets that are causing problems.