Reporting Overview
Reporting offers you a wide range of reports that present information about all aspects of your data, including projects, clients, and employees. The reports come with a set of default formatting options, which you may keep or change.
In Reporting, you can do the following:
- Generate reports to preview on the screen or to print. You can print the report immediately, or you can schedule it to run at a later time.
- Set report options that control how information is displayed on the report, which columns are included, and how the data is sorted and grouped.
- Select the data that is included on reports.
- Save sets of report options to use again. The sets of options include all settings on all options tabs. You can also save sets of selection criteria. Both types of named, saved sets are available whenever you print reports. This makes the reporting process easier and quicker.
- Create and save favorite report formats. A favorite is a set of saved options combined with a set of saved record selection criteria. After you create a favorite, you can generate a favorite report with current data with just one click. Vision automatically applies all options settings, including formatting options, and retrieves the appropriate records.
- Access any report or favorite report from your dashboard.
- Drill down to another report to see supporting detail.
- Export Vision data to an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file, a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet file, and other common file formats.
User roles determine whether or not a user can generate each type of report and what data is displayed on the reports they can generate.
Reporting Services
Vision uses SQL Server Reporting Services to generate standard reports, manage reporting processes, and provide tools for building custom reports. SQL Server Reporting Services is a component of Microsoft SQL Server and part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence framework. You automatically receive SQL Server Reporting Services with your SQL Server database.
The reporting features that SQL Server Reporting Services provides vary somewhat based on the version of SQL Server that you are using.
See the Deltek Vision Technical Installation Guide for detailed information about setting up reporting services, required versions of SQL Server Reporting Services, and related topics.
Report Administration
The Report Administration utility allows you to load reports on the report server, view the list of available printers for reports, display servers and reports' current activity, that are currently running on the report server, delete jobs, and view log data.
Reports Grid
You use the Reports grid to select reports, set options, select data, create favorites, preview reports, and print reports.
Report Descriptions
The Help System provides descriptions of the standard reports. The descriptions include column and option definitions. The report descriptions are grouped by category. For example, the descriptions for all reports related to contacts are grouped under Contacts.
Custom Reports
Reporting offers the following tools for creating custom reports from information in your Vision database:
- Report Builder — Use Report Builder to create simple table, matrix, and chart reports. You can filter, group, and sort report data, and you can use formulas in your reports.
- Report Designer — Use Report Designer to create both simple and complicated reports. Report Designer is a full-featured, advanced report writing tool that is hosted within Microsoft Visual Studio.
Vision Performance Management
Vision Performance Management, a separately priced, optional reporting feature, delivers business intelligence tools:
- Analysis Cubes — You can use Vision's Analysis Cubes to arrange report data without being familiar with the Vision database structure. You create custom reports using Microsoft Excel® or any reporting software that uses Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. When performance dashboards are added to Vision Performance Management in a future release, you will also be able to create custom dashboards based on the data in Analysis Cubes.
- Visualization — The Visualization feature uses shape, size, and color to give you an interactive and graphical view of your firm’s opportunities, plans, or projects. Trends and risks are immediately apparent. You can quickly determine the actions necessary to achieve greater performance. Larger blocks and more intense color indicate more serious risks or performance problems.
- Performance Dashboards (to be available in a future release) — Executives and managers will use these tools to view and interact with critical project and general ledger data in Vision Analysis Cubes using a variety of graphical representations of that data.
Related Topics
- Configuration and Reporting
Many options in other areas of Vision affect both the data you see in Reporting and the Reporting options available to you for working with the data. - Favorite Reports Overview
If you apply report options and record selection criteria to a report, Vision retains those settings for the report only until you log out. The next time that you log in, Vision again applies your default settings to the report. If you design a report format that you want to use again, save it as a favorite report. When you run a favorite report, you do not need to specify the options each time. - Reporting Procedures Overview
Vision Reporting offers many ways to create and generate reports. Initially, many of the reports have default settings for the report's options. You can change both the content of the report and its formatting if the default settings do not meet your needs. - Reporting Screens Overview
In addition to the Reporting form, you use the Options dialog box, Preview Window, and various formatting dialog boxes to work with and print reports. - Report Descriptions Overview
Reporting provides an extensive selection of standard reports. Each set of report description topics includes an overview topic, one or more topics that describe the report options, and a topic that describes the contents of the report columns. - Performance Management Overview
Vision Performance Management is an optional module that is available in two editions. The Vision Performance Management Edition contains the Analysis Cubes, Performance Dashboards, and Visualization components. The Performance Management Analysis Cubes Edition contains only the Analysis Cubes component. - Analysis Cubes Overview
Analysis Cubes, part of the Vision Performance Management module, provides you with a Vision project data cube and a general ledger data cube from which you can create custom Vision reports and performance dashboards. - Custom Reports Created with SQL Server Reporting Services
Standard reports that are provided with the Deltek Vision software are designed to meet most of your business needs. In addition, you can use Microsoft® SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and its report writing tools to create Vision custom reports.