FM Company Summary Reports?

[Mark Farmer]

Hello all (nice board!),

I was looking to not have to purchase a program that only runs on WIndows based computers called Fringe Facts Pro (www.bsiweb.com).

What I am looking for would be a Mac based FM Pro 5 template or app. that would give summary for all associates regarding 401/Medical/dental/disability/profit sharing/FICA/un employment etc....

This would run on one machine or a FM Server system and include math calculations and charting etc. for yearly reports for all associates.

Any help to avoid me wasting more time (on a 56k connection here at work) looking would be helpful.

If anyone has any help regarding this or could pass on my request, I would be grateful.

Thank you

[danjacoby]

Chances are that what you want is specific to your company -- or at least a great deal of what you want is company-specific -- and would require significant tweaking of any "off-the-shelf" template. If this is true, there are two categories of possibilities. You could:

Learn FMP enough to create a custom solution, or...

Hire a consultant to create one for you (there are several consultants on this forum whom I would recommend).

Certainly, FMP can handle all the calculations and summaries. And while FMP is theoretically not equipped to create charts, there are workarounds available to create charts within FMP, or ways to have Excel handle the charts, either through ODBC or by exporting the data.

Big benefits to using FMP include:

Cross-platform compatibility. You can run the same solutions on both Macs & Windows computers; there are very few features that only work on one platform or the other. Additionally, FMP can run on a mixed network!

More general usability. Once you get FMP, you'll find many more uses for it than just the original database solution for which you bought it.

Ease of use. Everyone I know who has used FMP and, say MS Access has said that Access is a royal pain (and Access is not available for Macs!), while FMP is much easier to get started, and enormously easier to get better.

Forums such as this, where you can get answers to just about any question you could possibly ask (about FMP, I mean -- we can't tell you how many angels fit on the head of a pin).

HTH,

Dan

[Lee J]

I agree with danjakoby, if you have the time FMP is worth learning, we tried to do a major Job-tracking system in Access, after 5 mths we trashed it and started in FMPro.

Within 3 months we had the system running in-house, Plus we had to deal with intergration with Mac/PC's/Unix and VMS.

[Mark Farmer]

Thanks guys,

for all the suggestions. I guess I was not clear on the fact that our company already has and utilized FM Pro Server etc...

It is used for many daily tasks already, time clock, employee schedules etc.

If one of you would like to forward the name of the person that might be able to design something like this for me that would be great. I was going to spend about $1000.00 on the peecee software, do you think your friend could design what I need for less?

cya

Farm