Friday Feature – Dynamic Sort Groups

Some of the most controversial questions really boil down to the eye of the beholder. Where do you squeeze the toothpaste? What should the sort option be for the Payroll Deduction and Contribution Detail (Pay34) report be?
Seriously, the beauty of a specific sort/group option for a report really is in the eye of the beholder. While some reports have multiple hard coded sorts, dozens upon dozens need to allow the user to define this at run time. To accommodate this, we have created a feature we call “dynamic sort groups.”

To see how this works, let’s take a look at the Pay34, which is used to build a list of deducts/contribs for payroll reconciliation.

Here are screenshots of the report parameters and the lookup for the sort/group options.

As you can see, this is a very powerful report.

Since it is used to reconcile pay, it is also quite important for it to be as flexible as possible.

Thus, the numerous parameters and the dynamic sort options, which you can see at the bottom.

This particular report has four sort options. That means you can define four different sort/group options at run time.

So, if you pick bargaining unit for sort/group 1 and deduct/contrib group for sort/group 2, your report is going to be sorted first by bargaining unit and then by deduction/contribution group.

Then, you could run it a second time—picking pay date and person type instead—producing a completely different report!

The ability to dynamically define the way you need a particular report to sort/group so that you are more efficient on a daily basis truly is a work of art, beautiful to all who behold.