Recently I have been hard at work building reports.  This has led to some "wouldn't it be nice if" thoughts as follows.  Note that these are just thought bubbles (and not currently a request to initiate a report improvement project) but I thought it useful to record them.

Requestor id: currently it is not possible to show the id or name of the user who requested the report because it is not provided to the report environment.  It would be nice if there was a parameter, say UserID, which gave the login id of the user [in the same way that there is an IsEmail parameter provided by the system which tells whether you are generating the report to be emailed].

Logical Dates: the system has a 'relative date' facility - ie setting -2y in the date field gets you today's date less 2 years.  For reporting purposes, a set of 'logical dates' would be useful for setting the from and to dates for a report.  For example lms=Last Month Start, lme=Last Month End, cms=Current Month Start, lqs=Last Quarter Start, etc. These types of dates are commonly used in accounting systems where one can save a report that always generates the data for say the end of the previous quarter.  Note that to implement this facility well, one really wants the abbreviations to be language dependent (after all 'last month start' in French is [says Google Translate] 'dernier départ mois'). One also needs to ability to define the financial year so that one can do lfs=Last Financial Year Start.  The logical date facility would also be useful for things like the Statement date on the Reporting|Debtors screen.

Saved Reports: it would be nice to be able to save a report and its parameters so that it can be easily run when needed. For this facility to be useful one needs both the above logical date facility, plus the ability to save the logical (or relative) date.

Regards, Tim G