Position reports are a very common requirement in Chris21. Many different areas of the business will require some sort of position report. For instance, Finance may require a report to give budget information by organisation level, or HR may need information about position incumbents by department.
The solution I usually go to is to create reports that link the employee table with the position table. This way, you can extract powerful reports that will show both the employee details along with the position details. The position details are things such as organisation levels, standard hours per week, position status, plus many other fields that are there for reporting purposes.
If you want more information about position linking and want to give it a try, see my blog Linking Files in Chris21 Reports.
But there is a way to grab fields from other files (with different parent keys), and without having to link the files. Read on…
Creating Position Reports Without File Linking
When it comes to position reports in Chris21, you have another option which doesn’t involve file linking. In this case, you can access inbuilt hidden Position Table (PDT) fields that are included on the Position (POS) file. There is a limited number of these fields, but in many cases, they will provide the detail you are looking for in your report.
You access these hidden fields by using the Field Chooser when creating your report. From the Field Chooser, hit F6 and enter POS to view the Position form. From here, you drag the fields that you want into your report. The fields from PDT that you want in your report won’t show up on POS, so you have to go to the list of all fields to find the ones you want.
Finding Hidden Fields
To do this, at the bottom of the Field Chooser click the All Fields tab. You will see a list of POS fields, in this list are the available hidden fields from PDT.
From here it is just a matter of finding the fields that you want and then double click to add to your report. For instance, if you want organisation level fields, look for the fields POS L0 CD – POS L9 CD. These cover the 10 available organisation levels. If you have, for example, an organisation level 4 called Department and you want to view it in your report, add the field POS L4 CD.
When you save and run your report, you will see your organisation level 4 in your report so that you can identify each employee and what department they belong to.
With this information, you can add other fields to you report, such as salary, and then publish to Excel. Once in Excel, you can filter by department or sort and create totals by department to show total salaries by department.
As I mentioned, the available hidden fields are limited so you can’t extract every field from PDT into your position report. When you can’t find the field you need your only option will be to link the POS and PDT files.
Give this a try as an alternative to linking files. You may find it a simpler approach to file linking with the same results. It can be a complicated topic, let me know in the comments if you have any questions.