vtiger CRM is an application well known for its merits, although it has its own limitations, especially when it comes to reporting. vtiger CRM’s reporting system is a fairly complete listing environment. It is capable of creating textual listings of all entities in the system and most of the relations between them. It permits adding parameters to the reports to limit the selected records with a flexible system that can accomplish retrieving the desired information in many cases. Certain information can become a bit cumbersome to obtain via reports, but a lot of valuable data can be obtained.

On top of this, the reporting system has a wizard to make creation easier and the reports can be organized in comprehensible folders for easy access. They also support a permission system with which the creator or administration user can decide who has access to the reports.

Although there is a lot of useful information that can already be obtained from the existing reporting system there seems to be a recurrent need for a more powerful reporting solution.

Some of the things that are missing are:

• Query construction is not exhaustive: NOT (all) and XoR commands are not available, OR command is not possible on multiple elements, does not support the grouping command;
• Reports can be sorted by three columns at most
• Aggregate functions can only be obtained for the total report. Need for subtotals for grouping elements
• Report formating with templates so we can apply the company’s look and feel
• Possibility of reporting on certain tables that are not reachable with the current system (users, audits, currency, pricebooks, ...)
• Report scheduling, to be able to launch a report at regular intervals and have them sent directly to whomever needs the information
• Include support for invoice and other entities output in place of the existing (very cumbersome) PDF output
• Full support of graphs and dashboard elements

It also suffers from certain limitations common among transaction-oriented applications.

Reporting is possible as far as it concerns the moment in which the analysis is made; and it goes as far as a quite simple statistical analysis can be suitable for the situation; e.g. reports on Contacts by Accounts, Contacts by Potential, or Leads by Source.

SalesOrder Datailed Report.

For the above reasons, the integration with a Business Intelligence application seems to be an appropriate, and fundamental in some cases, choice even for SMBs.

There may be many reasons to justify the use of business intelligence, but having a powerful means for analysis of data to support decision making seems to be enough for the case. Even if very simple analyses need to be processed, querying the information system directly can result in a considerable drawback.

These lackings take us to our next step in understand the project: Data warehousing