Service entries are an important basis for internal and external reporting and must be exported as flexibly as possible into an established format (MS Excel). In this article you will learn everything about the design of individual Excel templates and the export of filtered service entries, e.g. to create activity reports for your customers.
Use Case "Month-End Closing"
We all know it. At the end of the month, the month-end closing is due. All working hours must be recorded and assigned to the individual customer orders so that a complete accounting of all activities performed is possible.
When all billable service entries are available, an activity report is often created first and sent to the customer for review and approval. If the customer is satisfied with the activity statement, the invoice is issued. This receives the activity statement again as a document to make transparent what the invoice items are made up of.
This means that activity statements have to be prepared every month for all current customer orders, taking into account individual customer requirements. Often, however, the service entries are only exported in one format as an Excel or CSV file and the necessary adjustments must then be made manually in Excel. This is time-consuming, error-prone and also annoying work that is repeated every month.
Requirements
It would be much more convenient if the activity reports could be designed once individually for each use case / customer and then the creation of the activity reports can take place every month already in the desired formats.
It should be ensured that the creation of an individual template for a specific use case / customer is easy to understand and possible with little effort, so as not to create any technical hurdles here.
When exporting, it should be possible to select the desired template directly.
Export Activity Statements in foreknown
With foreknown release 1.1.0 we provide an easy way to export selected service entries based on a desired Excel template. To make this possible, the following enhancements have been created:
Extension of templates
A new type of "service entry export" has been added to the management of templates. This template type provides an Excel file, which already represents a possible activity statement, as a basic template.
You can use this template for your use cases or customer specific requirements as a starting point to design individual versions of the type "activity statement" and store them in foreknown.
Examples:
- Activity Statement "Standard": For a customer who has no special requirements for the activity statement.
- Activity report "Customer A": For a customer who has invidual requirements for the activity statement.
- Internal Performance Report: For internal purposes to provide a report on performance.
In the Excel file you use simple placeholders that have the format [#
Docu-Note: In the documentation you can find an overview of all placeholders and hints for their use under Documentation / Features / System Administration / Templates / Customize Excel Templates).
New action "Export service entries"
In order to bring service entries into an activity statement, you go to the "Service Entries" dialog and first select the desired amount of service entries via the filters. Then you execute the new list action "Export service entries", which opens a popup dialog.
In the popup dialog "Export service entries" you can select the desired template to be used for exporting the selected data. Finally you confirm the dialog with "Download" and the download of the Excel file starts. Depending on the amount of data it may take a little longer. A progress bar shows you the status of the download.
Thus, with a few clicks you have an activity statement in the form of an individually designed Excel table locally on your computer and can send it as an Excel or PDF document to your customers or colleagues.
In the documentation you will find an overview of the service management including the new list action "Export service entries" under Documentation / Features / Billing / Manage service entries.
Conclusion
With the help of this new export function for service entries and the free design of several variants via the Excel templates you are able to create
- individual activity statements for your customers and business partners (e.g. also recruiting companies like Gulp, Hays, Adecco) and
- special performance reports for internal reporting
Since the Excel exports are then already in the desired format and design, there is no need for further preparation. This regularly saves working time and reduces the susceptibility to errors.