General Consultant Discussion

Phone call of the day (so far): Customer: Can you create a report that exports to ... ME: Sure I can give you a price .. Customer: Oh, it's not going to be a 5 minute thing? ME: I don't know ... I don't have any details about the report (Insert 20 minutes of remote session where customer answers ""I don't know"" to 1/2 the questions regarding what should be on the report).

Please tell me this is at least one of your existing customers...

I used to have a Report Request form I would email with a list of questions that needed to be answered before we would discuss a report request in detail. I can't find mine but it's due for a re-create anyway. Does anyone else have one?

Wayne, that's why they pay you the big bucks!

Here's a sample of something that I typically use: 1. Who and what the report is for, and how you'd like to distribute 2. Would you like it added to the Sage 100 menu? If so: a. Which module's Custom Reports menu? b. What should the menu item say? c. Which Security Role(s) should have access to it? 3. The (columns of) data you need , and any applicable formulas 4. Grouping 5. Sorting 6. Totals 7. Hard-coded selection criteria 8. Any user-defined parameters for running the report 9. Title of the report 10. Any other relevant information 11. And a sample report is always helpful (maybe do something manual in Excel as example).

A picture is worth 1000 words. I always request a spreadsheet of how the report should look. All questions are asked upon review of spreadsheet, with a disclosure that it's never a 5 minute thing (even if it is).

In a decent number of cases (but not all) I believe the customer is thinking we'll log in alongside them then create the report on the fly and modify it on the fly. A surprising number (but not all) have no idea what the report should look like or the effort involved. I've found that before you start down the 4 hours discovery path it's VERY important to give some ""starts at"" pricing. Jon Reiter at DSD opened my eyes to this years ago. To me he was one of the pioneers in pricing custom type work. His simple explanation for one of my supposed easy mods --- our minimum programming fee is $ X. This to me solves a lot of problems with pricing and wasting time creating quotes and specs that go nowhere. I see nothing wrong with telling a customer that ""For us to create a custom report for you we require that it creates at least $ 750 of value or we should not do the report as that's our starting price for custom reports"". There's so much unseen extra work that happens to come up that even the ""quick 5 minute report"" is usually more like three hours by the time you're done with requests for tweaks, adding to menu then possibly loading Crystal on workstations so you can tweak the report.

If we are assuming the report will be written in Crystal, there is always an option for the user to attend Introduction to Crystal Reports for $790 (plus Data File Structures at $395 and Crystal Beyond the Basics at $790). Then (maybe) they can write the report themselves. Considering those expenses and up to a five day commitment, a $750 minimum seems completely reasonable. If the report is written using another application, there's education for that too and when they walk out of the class, they won't have a deliverable (yet).