MoneyWorks

Sequential Report Chains

It is possible to chain a number of reports together so that they print sequentially. Note that report chains are deprecated, as equivalent reports can now be created using For-Loops in a single custom report.

Simple Report Chain

A report chain can be used to have a number of reports print as a single job. This is useful if the reports will take some time to print and you don’t want to attend the computer to start each one printing individually. This is called a Simple Report Chain.

When printing a Simple Report Chain, each report uses the page setup and report settings that have been saved with the chain document, and each report will always start on a new page.

Compound Report Chain

A report chain can also be used to create a single compound report in which members of the report chain are printed with their own individual breakdown settings. This allows you to have breakdowns within a report, rather than simply having the report reprinted for each item in the breakdown. This is called a Compound Report or Chain Report.

When printing a Compound Report, you have a single page setup for the whole report, but each element of the chain (or sub-report) has its own report settings.

As a simple example of this process, you could create a report with two basic parts designed to print details of all income accounts and then expense accounts. When printing this report using a breakdown by category, the report would print income and then expense details for the first category, and then repeat the process for subsequent categories.

If you wanted a report which printed a category breakdown for all income accounts in one section, and then repeated the process for the expense accounts, you could create two sub-reports and chain them together. Each sub-report would contain the appropriate part (containing either the income or the expense accounts) and would print a full breakdown of the accounts in that range in a consecutive block.