Document a report before its owner moves on

The problem

Every team has a report only one person really understands. It might be a payroll register, an open purchase order report, a work order backlog or a financial statement. When that person is on vacation, changes roles or leaves, the report waits, or gets run with the wrong filters and nobody notices.

The solution

Write a one-page record for each report that matters, while its owner is still around to answer questions. It works the same in any Infor suite and any reporting tool.

1. Name and location. The report's exact name and where it lives (folder, menu path or tool), so someone else can find it.
2. Purpose and audience. One or two sentences: what question it answers and who reads it.
3. Owner and backup. The person who runs and checks it, and the person who can do the same when the owner is out.
4. Parameters and filters. Every prompt and filter, with the values used each run, such as period, company, department or location.
5. When and how it runs. Manual or scheduled, how often, and where it fits in any run order. For scheduled reports, note how to confirm it ran on current data, not just that it finished.
6. Where the output goes. The one place it's saved, and the naming rule (report name plus period).
7. How to check it. One simple check that proves the output is right, such as a total that should agree with another report or system figure.
8. Known quirks. Anything that has caught someone out before.
9. Last reviewed. The date the record was last checked against the real report.

Keep the records together, next to your other runbooks, and review them at least once a year or whenever a report changes.

How it was checked

This is a working template rather than a one-off test result, so try it on one report in your own environment. A good test: ask the backup to run the report using only the one-page record, without help from the owner. If their output matches the owner's for the same period and filters, the record is doing its job. If they get stuck, add what was missing.

Shared by

Shared by the ECS Reporting Solutions team. Adapted from our article How to Speed Up Your Month-End Report Pack in CloudSuite. Have a better way to do this, or a solution for a related problem? Share it with the community.