16. Reporting

Overview

This STEP is INSTRUCTIONAL

Finale Inventory has numerous built-in Reports that can all be run in various formats.

• Standard Reports

• Standard Labels - Finale Inventory supports printing labels to both laser/inkjet sheet printers and dedicated label printers. All printers and page templates are supported. Finale has built-in label templates for Receiving POs, Product Item Labels, Shipment box labels, and labels for stock locations. Finale Inventory supports UPC and Code128 type barcodes. Get with your account managers for more details.
• Customized Reports and Labels
  • The Rows - Finale's solution for creating custom reports without programming is based on Excel. The idea is that to create a report you start out with a giant virtual spreadsheet called a data set that has rows for all the items that may contribute to the report and columns for all the fields that could be relevant to the report. For example, if you are making a report to summarize all the invoices in a date range, your data set begins as the list of all the rows of all the invoices. Another way to think about the data set is to imagine printing out all your invoices and taping them together one on top of the other in a long, tall list of invoice rows. After choosing the data set, you select some filters to remove the rows that don't apply. For example, if your report covers a specific date range, you'd filter out the rows from the invoices outside of that range.
  • The Primary Columns - After specifying the rows in the dataset, you specify the fields that you want to see in the report. These fields become the columns. For example, if you just wanted to see the total amount invoiced to the customers and didn't want any other details then you really only want two fields: Customer and Invoice Total. There are more details for choosing how the totals add up, but specifying the rows and columns like this is basically how you generate a custom report in Finale. Tallying the totals has the effect of combining the rows that are tallied together, which whittles down the tall list of rows into just the rows you see in the report. What began as a giant virtual spreadsheet is now the report that you see.
  • Formatting - Once you've defined what goes into the report, you have the option to layout the information in a page template that you define to look any way you want. If you've printed an invoice or sales order in Finale, then you've already used reports maybe without even knowing it, because the documents printed by Finale are just reports that are formatted with custom page templates!

How-to Video

Next Step: 16. Barcoding