How to save on ink when printing Sage 500 reports

2 minute read time.

For those that still print registers or reports to paper, there is a task that can help you manage what gets printed on those reports. There are several sections on the body of report that can be modified. Lets take a look at this task in more detail.

From System Manager, Maintenance, launch the Maintain Report Format task. When the task is displayed, there is a companyid dropdown, a tab section, and a preview section on the right.

The Company dropdown enables you to affect the changes to all companies or ones you specify. Next, there are section of 8 tabs. Each tab is a different section of the report that can be changed and displays the elements that can be changed

Lastly, on the right side of the screen, there is a preview area. This will show a sample report and what the change would look like as you make the change. The changes made will affect ALL the standard Sage 500 reports for each company

Before we make any changes, you should be logged into a test environment which will leave the production environment safe.

Here are some examples of how to reduce the amount of ink that is printed on reports. Click on the Company tab and under the Company Bar area, click on the No option. Notice on the sample report that the blue bar at the top of the form has been removed. Locate the Bold section and click No, which will make Systems of America regular print. Click on the Module tab, and under the Bold section, select No and notice on Preview Panel, the report sample, the word Module is now regular print.  Repeat the process for Title and the Subtitle tabs. Lastly, click on the Msg Lines and Footer tab and set the Bold option to No as well.

You have now removed the large bar that is printed on the pages at the top of the page plus many fields are now not bolded where it is not needed.  Before you click Save, check the Company dropdown to make sure you are saving the changes to the correct companyid.

Review the other options on each tab and determine whether you can take advantage of setting them to No, or a different size, or in some cases, change the Logo to a smaller version of itself. Also, if you click on a section on the sample report in the Preview Panel, the related tab will have focus. Its a way to locate the correlated tab section and the area in the report.

I hope you give this a try and see if you can save some ink!