Learning about External Report

Like Report Manager, you can use External Report in the Estimating Management Console to create snapshots of your data that you can use in custom reports, dashboards, and business intelligence tools to analyze the data in a variety of ways.

Advantages of using External Report

The data you generate for external reports remains available in a separate database, so you can use it with a variety of third-party reporting and business intelligence tools. In contrast, the data that Report Manager generates is removed as soon as you close the report.

The tables that are available in External Report databases are the same as those available for Report Manager. For more information, see Using Sage Estimating Data on Reports.

You can generate external report data for one estimate at a time in either of the following ways:

• In the Estimating Management Console, by selecting a configuration from the Catalog pane and then clicking [Generate] for each estimate.

  Tip: If you want to maintain only 1 estimate in the external report database, you can select the Limit generated estimate count option for the configuration, and then specify 1 as the count. You might do this, for example, if you want to build a report in Excel without having to figure out the EstimateId needed to extract the data. When you select this option, existing estimates are removed from the database each time you generate an estimate if the newly generated estimates would exceed the limit.

• In Sage Estimating, by clicking Generate Data on the Reports ribbon to generate data for the current estimate.

You can also generate data for multiple estimates all at once by running the Estimating External Report Database Generator.