XL Reporter and Crystal Reports

The two high-end reporting tools available in SAP Business ONE are XL Reporter and Crystal Reports. I am explaining these tools together to better distinguish their functionality for you. In short, XL Reporter runs from within SAP Business ONE and will export report data directly into Excel. Crystal Reports will allow you to retrieve the results and then export to the most common formats.

XL Reporter comes with a long list of very powerful pre-defined reports. Those are dashboard-style reports that make heavy use of graphs in Excel. The advantage is that you have all of the results in Excel. The disadvantage is that you need Excel to run these reports. Crystal Reports will not provide all of the Excel power for further processing of data. However, with Crystal Reports the result can be retrieved via a local Crystal Viewer or a Web Dashboard.

Therefore, if you have a high-performance desktop computer and are proficient in the use of Excel, then I highly recommend using XL Reporter. Crystal Reports has the same data visualization power without the Excel Processing Functionality. For large-scale implementations, Crystal Reports can be deployed on a separate server. Therefore, it can offset the required processing load from the desktop computer to a powerful server.

At the time of writing this section, SAP has released a new add-on for SAP Business ONE which will integrate Crystal Reports. As you may know by now, SAP has purchased Business Objects, which was the former owner of Crystal Reports. Based on the latest roadmap for SAP Business ONE, Crystal Reports is a strategic platform for reporting. This means all SAP reports will soon be available in native Crystal Reports format.