There are several system variables available for use with Sage MAS Intelligence reports. These are very useful, especially when setting up reports that will run automatically on a schedule. But there is room for improvement.
I created a report that accepts date parameters in the form of YYYYMM. This was the only way I could make the report work so that it would allow me to properly fence-off time periods. If I wanted to schedule this report to run automatically, there are no system variables that would allow it to work.
SMI currently offers @DAY@ and @MONTH@ variables, but I would like to suggest that you add 2-digit versions for both of these. In other words, keep what is there, but add versions of these variables that always show 2 digits. If it's the 3rd day of the month, make it "03." If it's April, "04." This is needed when the report is using numbers to represent date values and you need to fence-off periods, as I'm doing with a report where the year/month parameter is entered as YYYYMM. I had to make the month value a 2-digit (MM) value or else the system would not be able to correctly fence-off the time periods.
Also, there are currently variables for previous year and next year, which is great, but it would be helpful to have @PRIORMONTH@ also, both a standard version that shows any of the first nine months as a single number, and a 2-digit version that shows them with a leading zero. If a previous month variable was available, I could set up this report to run during the first week of every month reporting on last year and current YTD through the end of LAST MONTH, which is what the report is designed to do. But without a @PRIORMONTH@ variable, the report can't be set to autorun because a user is required to enter the date parameters in the form of YYYYMM, where 'MM' = last month.
Finally, allow variables to be combined. For example, in order to schedule this report to autorun, in addition to having a 2-digit prior month option, I would also need to combine variables, like this: @YEAR@@PRIORMONTH2D@.

by: Ralph A. | over a year ago | 4 - Reports / BI