We were working on a report that used two years of sales transaction data to calculate This Month, Year to Date. and equivalent numbers for last year. We asked ourselves the question of how to audit this report, and needed an easy way to examine some of the thousands of records to see if our numbers were correct.

We used report alerts, where we made the alerts specific to a product and date range, and when these alerts were triggered we could use the Alert view to confirm our numbers against the balances inside the application.

Rerunning the report against other products and data ranges let us randomly check a sample of the report data. The great thing was that within the alert, drill downs were still possible, so additional filtering helped to confirm the numbers in the report.

Report Alerts first appeared in Crystal Reports 8.5, so older versions do not have this feature.

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