There are several ERP platforms available in the market. One of the top most used ERP platforms intend for small and medium-sized businesses is SAP Business One. SAP Business One (also known as SAP B1) was designed in a such a way that smaller companies need ERP software to help manage their business, but not the kind of ERP that large and complex organizations need. It comes in two flavors : on-premise and cloud installation.
SAP B1 is built and run on with two databases:
- Microsoft SQL Server
- SAP HANA
This business management software connects and streamlines a company’s processes. It is designed to help the business grow by managing each aspect of a company’s activities from sales and customer relationships to financials and operations.
SAP Business One Core Modules
SAP Business One offers various modules to manage operations and sales. Following are the core areas that it addresses.
- Financial Management: To help businesses improve margins, reduce errors and enable more profitable decision-making.
- Sales and Customer Management: Overview the complete sales process and customer life-cycle from initial contact to final sale, after-sales service and support.
- Purchasing and Inventory Control: Improves purchasing practices and controls costs by enabling users to manage the complete order-to-pay cycle, including receipts, invoices, returns and payments.
- Business Intelligence: enable users to create timely, configurable and accurate reports based on data from across the business.
- Analytics and Reporting: Help to make a better business decisions by capturing all the critical data in real time and making it instantly available company-wide via dashboards and reports.
In SAP B1, company uses some reporting tool like Crystal Report etc to generate the report. We will be using this tool for our custom add-on.We are going to explain the custom Add-on features which will help us to extract the report (Sales Quote) in PDF format at run-time.
Why do we need PDF generation add on to SAP Business One:
In general, Headquarters use SAP B1 to manages the business process. It is not ideal situation to share the SAP access with sales person who is working on the ground level.
Add-On core functionality:
It will help us to export the report (Sales quote PDF for this article) to a given network path. We are going to discuss the functionality in details below.
Crystal Report
It is a business intelligence application, which is used to create a custom reports from our variety of data source. It is very flexible application to do the development. It is not constricted to using one data source or one database or database type (MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, etc) in a report. Developers can leverage cross-platform support for both .NET and Java. HTML is generated directly by Crystal Reports, allowing developers to focus on application business logic, rather than tedious, time-intensive hand coding. Separation of application development and report design tasks allow developers to focus on application development, while the report authors can focus on report design. This provides flexibility, as many companies store their data in different places and on different systems.
SAP Business One PDF Generation – custom add-on
We will be creating a PDF report whenever there will new sales quote created or existing quote updated. It will create the Quote PDF to given network path in config
Pre-requisite:
- Existed report (old quote) .RPT file for the layout
- Database access
- Company Details
Steps to Configure:
Once we install the add-on to SAP B1 we will get the menu like below:
Step 1 :
Click on the below menu. It will create the respected UDF related to add-on in SAP B1 database. After successful execution you will receive a pop-up with a success message.
Step 2:
Click on the configuration menu. You will see a popup with four tabs menu like below.
Step 3:
Fill the respected details like the RPT file location , network path where PDF will store and any custom UDF details you want to show for that specific Quote PDF report. For example: region value of the Quote.
Step 4:
Fill the data base and company details like below. We can validate the credential by clicking on test connection. If all the info is correct, you will get a success message in response. Password info will get encrypted immediate after once we click on save.
Step 5:
We can do testing with one existing quote. We will add some data in remarks and update the quote PDF. If all the steps have performed above correctly, it will create the PDF file at given network path at the config. I hope this article helps you to set up the custom quote.
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