Adding a new twist to old payables system

January 23, 200124 yr

I have a payables system that up until this point has worked for all purposes. Now our corporate would like me to add a Comparative Expenses Report from the payables system. At this point I am able to generate a General Ledger Distribution Report by finding the month then sorting it by GL #. The report gives a total for each General Ledger number in the preview mode. I would like to take the totals from the General Ledger report and place then on the new report. I have made a new layout and put the GL # and GL Name field on the report but when I look at the report in browse mode I get an entry for each transaction. I would like to group them according to classes. Is this possible? Help!

January 23, 200124 yr

Author

I am sorry, I have a Vendors DB, General Ledger DB, Payables DB. In the payables database I have 3 layouts. One is the data entry form. The other is the listing for double checking data entry. One is for the GL Distribution report that has a subsummary part when sorted by GL #. The next layout is the new Comparative Report. I tried putting the GL # and the GL Name on the report but that gave me every transaction. Example if there were 10 Retail Advertising-Supplies transaction it gave me 10 listings. Need to combine them. Will try your suggestion. Sorry not very good at explaining. First year of trying to get corporate up to speed on computer database use.

January 24, 200124 yr

You mention reports, but don't tell us how many files you have. I'll assume that you have one file for all the reports. You can total a Month/GL# by creating a relationship based upon Month and GL#. Define a field:

Index (calculation, indexed, text) =

Right("00" & Month(Date), 2) & GL#

Create a self relationship Index matching Index.

Create a Total field:

GLMonthTotal (calculation) =

Sum(SelfByIndex::Amount)

This calculations makes some assumptions about the report layout (the calculation depends upon which record you are on), but without a lot more detail about you database files and report layouts it is hard to give you exact instructions. Place the GLMonthTotal on you layout and see what happens.

-bd