Understanding Standard Reports

Planful delivers presentation quality financial reports, budget workflow, and administrative reports.

Standard Reports

Deploy Standard reports to make them active and available to users. Once reports are deployed, Administrators must grant user access. Dimension security functionality is applicable to standard reports. Users will only generate standard reports for entities/data to which they have access either by their assigned Budget Approval Role or within Dimension Security.

These standard reports are organized into two major types:

• System Reports -These reports are available in all customer applications and cannot be edited. They are generated by leveraging the reporting categories maintained against each of the financial dimensions (Chart of Accounts).
• User Reports - These reports are published by uploading and deploying new reports and can be organized under the Report Groups that you define.

To learn more about the description of each Standard Report, click here.

How to Deploy Standard Reports and Make Them Available to Users?

To deploy a Standard Report, follow the below steps:

Task 1 - Complete the following steps to deploy a standard report:

1. Navigate to Maintenance > Report Administration > Standard Reports.
2. Verify the Standard Reports tab is selected.
3. Select the appropriate reports.
4. Click the More list box and select Deploy Reports.
   
5. Select a place to store the reports within the File Cabinet.
   
6. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen will indicate when deployment is complete. Deployed reports have a Deployed status.

Task 2 - Complete the following steps to provide user access to a report:

1. Navigate to Maintenance > Administration > User & Role Management.
2. Select a user and click More.
3. Select Report Access.
4. Select the reports deployed in task 1.

Optionally, you can provide access to a group of users by completing task 3 instead of task 2.

Task 3 - Complete the following steps to provide group access to a report:

1. Navigate to Maintenance > Administration > User & Role Management.
2. Select a user group and click More.
3. Select Report Access.
4. Select the reports deployed in task 1.

Data Sources

Planful delivers system-defined data sources to access reporting cubes and the application database. With Data Sources, you can specify parameters to import or exchange data with a SQL data source.

Description of Fields on the Add Data Sources Page

Navigate to Maintenance > Report Administration > Standard Reports and click the Data Sources tab. On the Add Data Source page, the following fields are shown:

Server Type: Select from one of the two types of supported servers; Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

Server Name: Enter the name of the server you are connecting to. The instance name must be correct and SQL Server must be properly configured to allow remote connections.

Database Name: Enter the name of the source database.

Authentication:

• An Authentication allows you to connect to a SQL Servers. Authentications are required to access data sources.
• SQL Server Authentication is supported by Microsoft SQL Server.
• Windows Authentication is supported by Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

User Name/Password: Specify a user name for the database connection when you are using SQL Server Authentication. Provide the password for the database connection when you are using SQL Server Authentication.

Report Groups

Group standard reports for categorization purposes. For example, group all budget reports, consolidation reports, and so on. Users can use the report groups created while adding a new Standard Report.

How to Add a Report Group?

To add a new Report Group, follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Maintenance > Report Administration > Standard Reports.
2. Click the Report Groups tab.
3. Click the Add icon.
4. Enter the Code and Name.
5. Click Save.