Alternative for Financial Reporting in SAP 9.0

A bit about myself.

     I’m an SBO Implementation Consultant with 7 years of experience and i’ve implemented in over 15 companies. Throughout my years implementing I’ve always used XL Reporter to build Financial Reports as an alternative to SBO’s layouts. Its easy to use and you can build General Balance & Profit and Loss reports very fast. Combining month vs previous months vs YTD previous year vs actual budget grouped by DIM1 in the same report, for example, was a piece of cake.

Now…..as we all know, in SBO 9.0 and above, XL Reporter is not compatible with Excel 2013 and above. And we cant expect the customer to stick with excel 2010 or below just to enjoy the functionality. ENTER CRYSTAL REPORTS (CR)!!! For the past 3 years I’ve used CR but mostly to make sales, purchase and banking reports or to make printing layouts for documents but never for financial reports. I’ve tried to modify the standard CR Layout for the General Balance and P&L and also make the layout based on my own query but making the report and grouping the accounts the way the customers wants it has been a headache!! to say the least. Combining budgets grouped by projects and dimensions in a P&L in CR has proved very complicated.

So my question is, is there an easier alternative for financial reporting or has anyone build a template others can use as a base for financial reporting. Any help would be greatly appreciated.