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Sample Reports
Accounting program are only as good as the reports they produce, and the same statement can be made for The Accounting Library as well as any other program of this type. We will present examples of each report as well as a brief description of what can be inferred from the information presented.
List Questions
Once you have completed your needs definition, it should be verified to make sure it is in fact an accurate representation of your requirements. The program allows you to review just the features selected, all questions (to make sure you have not missed anything), only those questions from particular modules, or only your critical requirements (those assigned a value of 9). The report below is a brief sample of what is called the List Questions Report. Finally, the List Questions Report allows you to compare your requirements against any product(s) selected. This last option can be called a quick and dirty analysis, but without having to wait for the program to analyze all products.
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Ranking Report
The most basic report is the Ranking Report. The program will take your needs definition, compare it against each product, calculate a total weighted score for each product, and rank them according to how close they match your requirements. In addition, the program will calculate a percentage-of-needs-met score taking the total score earned and dividing it by the maximum possible score. This percentage score is probably easier to interpret than the total raw score.
While the program gives full credit for all YES answers for each product (and of course zero credit for any NO answer), you control how it interprets all other responses (R=Report Writer, T=Third Party Product, A=Added Field, M=Modification, C=Customization and F=Future Release). If the use of a third party application does not bother you very much, you can set an option whereby the program discounts the vendors responses by only 5% or 10% for all T (Third Party) responses. However, if a product needs to be modified, you might want to discount the vendor's response by 90% or even 100%. In the end this gives you much greater control of how each vendor's responses will be scored, and therefore how each product will be ranked.
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Module Report
Once you have examined the Ranking Report, and developed a feel for how close each product meets your requirements and how they relate to each other in the rankings, you should begin to create and study more detailed reports which will help you understand more clearly each products strengths and weaknesses. The Module Report is the first in this series of progressively more detailed analytical reports. It allows you to see for each product you select (either individually or grouped together with other products) not only the score for the whole product but each module. The intent here is to help you see where a product may be strong, and of perhaps more importance where it seems to be weaker than you like or weaker than other products. From this point on in the analysis, the program will not eliminate any product. Only you can do that.
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Subsection Report
The Subsection Report takes you one level deeper by letting you see not only the score for the product as a whole and each module, but also for each subsection within each module. As in the case of the Ranking and Module Reports, this report has been designed to assist you identify relative strengths and weaknesses of the products in which you have an interest. While the program utilizes the raw weighted score to rank products, most users feel more comfortable basing their analysis upon the percentage of needs met score.
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Full Questions Report
Once you have developed a sense of a product's relative strengths and weaknesses, you will then know exactly where you need to look to see why it is strong or weak in particular areas. The Full Question Report compares your needs line-by-line against the product or products you select. Here you will be able to see exactly where a product fails to meet your needs. In addition you can determine if a product meets your needs through the core applications or through a Third Party, Report Writer, Added Field, Modification or Future Release.
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Features Absent Report
While you can scan through the Full Questions Report to determine where a product might be lacking, the better way might be to ask the program to display all features that are missing. The Features Absent Report lets you isolate missing features in exactly this manner and then you can use this report as a basis of discussion with vendors and/or their VARs.
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Eliminated Products Report
If you have specified any requirement as critical (either by using a value of "9" in your needs definition or by defining any numerical requirements), some products might be eliminated. The Ranking Report will list all products eliminated as in the example below. If you are interested, you can run the Eliminated Products Report to determine why one or more products have been eliminated. If you feel too many products have been eliminated because you have defined too many requirements as being critical, you can modify your needs definition and run the ranking again.
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