If there was “my most important blog post of the year” category this would be it. HCSS has a great custom reports group that can do amazing things for a very reasonable price. It is a service that HCSS struggles to get the word out (do a search on HCSS.com and nothing comes up). Quick story – a company I trained had to have a certain calculation done for their clients and we went round and round on this trying to use key indicators. Finally after two years they got a custom report done by the HCSS Custom Reports group. We wasted more money arguing on potential solutions than what the custom report cost! You might think that a custom report is just a static document but they can have user-controlled input, checkboxes with options etc. Here are some suggestions on what a custom report can do:

  • Customer Quotes – one of the most obvious. Get the quote exactly like the way you want it to. Sure HCSS has the Custom Quote and Word option but there are not very many formatting options
  • Custom Calculations – stop exporting to a spreadsheet just to get a set of calculations. And the report can be exported to Excel if required
  • Custom cost report
  • Change Order Breakdown

If you put a cost on the gyrations that many customers go through to get a report out in Excel the cost of a custom report can be quickly be recovered. Interested? Send a mockup (it can be very simple) to custom@hcss.com and request a quote. Highly recommended.