What Are Reports?

Reports provide a method of presenting information about clients in Control Centre. They allow you to see at a glance:

• which clients have reached a given stage in the production of a tax return
• which clients have certain types of annual data e.g. bank or building society interest
• complete lists of all clients of particular client types

For example, you can produce a report that lists which clients have authorised their Tax Return or which clients have had their final Return filed with HM Revenue & Customs or a report which lists all individual and partnership clients.

A report does not only list the names of clients but can also present any fields from the client's data that you wish to include. A field is a textual representation of variable information that you use to construct a report. The data for each client will appear in place of the corresponding fields for the client in the report e.g. Abrahams, John, Mr would appear for a client called John Abrahams for the field Report Name. For example you could list the Client Code, Billing Code, Client Name and the Return Filed date of each Personal Tax client whose Tax Return has been filed with HM Revenue & Customs for that tax year. Some reports allow you to include some fields from the client's annual data e.g. the Clients with Bank/ Building Society Interest report displays the amount of interest each client has.

Figure 1 - An Example Report

The criteria used to select which clients should be included in a particular report depends on which report type you are using. Self-Assessment reports check that certain dates have been set, or in some cases that certain dates have not been set for a particular client. In the above example, a client's Self assessment filed date must have been set for a client to be included in the report. Other reports require a certain value to exist for the client to be included on the report. For example, the Clients With Bank/ Building Society Interest requires that the appropriate data has been entered in Personal Tax or Partnership Tax for the client.

Each report in Control Centre includes clients from the dataset that is currently open. You can only produce reports on a single dataset at a time. This should be a consideration when you are deciding whether to use more than one dataset.

Each report in Control Centre has been pre-designed so that certain data is included for each client listed in that particular report. It is possible for you to change which data is included in the report. You can also change the layout and general appearance of the report. Once you have made any changes to the report design, you can save it as a new report with a different name. You cannot overwrite the pre-designed report.

Select the Reports button from the main frame tool bar or select Report Generator from the Tools menu to open the Select Report window. From here you can preview, print and modify the design of reports.