Professional Services - Custom FOrms Design
Beautiful, professional business forms that can boost your image
You probably know that all the reports and forms in Spire are produced using a program called Crystal Reports, which is one of THE industry-standard database reporting tools.
Basically, there are two ways Crystal is used in Spire - for Forms such as invoices, PO's, cheques, and so on, and for Reports such as inventory, sales, customer or AR/AP reports.
Crystal Reports and Custom Spire Forms
Forms are generated by the system mostly when you complete transactions. For example, when you save a sales order, the system lets you print an Order Confirmation, Packing Slip or Invoice depending on the context. These forms all contain the data about a transaction. So far, so good.
Some people choose to use the Invoice, Packing Slip, Order Confirmation and other forms that come built-in to Spire. However, these forms are designed for generic use, and to really do the job, most companies prefer to have them customized. This is an inexpensive way to make your forms really stand out. After all, if your customer has a stack of invoices on their desk, don't you want them to be able to see and identify yours in a hurry? It's logical that this can actually help you get paid faster and more accurately.
We offer complete customization of any of the Spire forms that the system generates, and well over 90% of our clients have chosen custom forms over the standard built-in ones. A great-looking form is part of your corporate image, and is worth the very small investment to get it.
Fun fact:
We were literally the
very first people to be able to print professionally designed laser-printed forms for BusinessVision, in 1992.
We developed a neat hardware / software solution that we sold both to clients and to our competitors to sell
to their clients. It was about 8 years before BusinessVision had any built-in laser forms printing capability.
Custom Reports for Spire
There's a lot of data buried in Spire, and the built-in reports are quite good at helping you extract that data and turn it into information you can use.
However, the built-in reports aren't always exactly what you need, and that's where Crystal Reports comes into play. Using Crystal, we can pull together whatever data you have in the system and create reporting to use that to help you run your business - whether that's adding a column to an existing report, or creating something completely new.
Basically, if you have to assemble the same data repeatedly and you're doing it manually, there's a better way! By using Crystal effectively (sometimes in conjunction with other tools), you can get at the information you need.
Here are just a few examples of custom reports we've done recently for clients:
Custom Reporting Examples
- Commissions - one client went from 3+ days/month calculating commissions, down to 1 hour
- Sales Reports - sales summary by province; monthly sales summaries with graphs; sales of units or dollars for rolling 12-month period; sales by customer / invoice with options for detailed or summary output, etc.
- Sales Order Summary - weekly bookings and similar
- Sales Order Details - to plan picking, reordering or manufacturing so your team can be prepared for what they need
- Serial or Lot Numbers - purchase & sales history by serial number for warranty or item recall tracking
- AR Summary - by sales rep or territory
- Inventory Labels - with barcodes
- Inventory - item list by category or vendor
- AR Cash Receipts Journal - versions that can be used as a bank deposit slip
Tell us what you need to know
Whether you're new to Spire or a long-time user, if you need to get more OUT of it, please contact us today, and we can review your requirements. If the data's in there, we can get it out for you in ways that will make your business more efficient.