How to Design Templates for .NET Financial Reports

The ability to visually communicate quantitative data is a fundamental necessity in financial reporting. Your .NET financial report should provide a visual representation of useful data that is comprehensive and easy to understand. Without quantitative information presented in easily digestible visuals, time is wasted struggling to understand the meaning and significance of the data.

One of the many great features of ActiveReports Server is the ease of creating and using existing templates to create multiple reports with the same style or layout. ActiveReports Server comes with eleven out-of-the box templates to cover many common report types, such as address labels, chart and table reports, dashboards, financial composite chart reports, invoices, letters, organization branded reports, pivot style reports, and more. If you (or your end-users) need to create more templates, the HTML5 Web Designer makes it quick and easy! This article demonstrates how to create a .NET financial report template in ActiveReports Server.

In another article, we offer a video demonstration on getting started with in ActiveReports, creating a .NET report.

Creating .NET report templates

Step 1:

First, we are going to create the template as if it were a regular report. Open the HTML5 Web Designer, and start designing the report template. Remember, we do not need any data in the report itself. It will act as a template for future reports. In this example, we are going to create an Income Statement financial report template. For an Income Statement, we want a consistent color scheme, a company logo, a title, and a table for data entry.

Your final Income Statement template should look something like the image below:

Step 2:

Once the .NET financial report template is finished, we want to save it on our server. Once it is saved, we can designate that report as a template, so that users can use it when creating future Income Statement reports.

Navigate to the Administrator Dashboard, then click on the Reports tab. Find your Income Statement report and select it. Once selected, expand the Report Properties menu.

When you expand the Report Properties menu, you will see a blue button below the properties which allows you to set the selected report as a template. Click the ‘Set as template’ button. Once clicked, the report will be moved from your reports list to your templates list. Navigate to the Templates tab, and you will see your newly created template!

Step 3:

Now that we have the report template created, it is ready to be used! In the Report Portal, click ‘Create Report’. You will be prompted with all available report templates, including our newly created Income Statement template! Select the template by double-clicking it, and you will be immediately taken to the report designer, where you can fill the template with data to create a fully functional and clean looking Income Statement report.

That’s all there is to it! You can see that creating a template and utilizing it can be done in just a few quick steps for seamless report creation. ActiveReports gives the report author infinite potential for .NET reporting on any kind of organization, whether it is reporting for financial institutions, healthcare, insurance, government, marketing, IT, HR, or general business operations.