Crystal Reports is woven into more legacy systems than most businesses realise. It ships embedded in dozens of older ERP, accounting, and business management platforms — and it's been used to build standalone reporting solutions that have quietly become business-critical.

The Crystal Reports problem

Crystal Reports has a specific failure mode: it becomes invisible infrastructure. Reports get built, they run, they produce the numbers that drive decisions — and nobody thinks about them until something breaks.

What breaks:

• The ERP or accounting system it was embedded in is being replaced, and the reports can’t be carried across
• The report was built to connect to a specific database version that no longer exists
• The developer who built the reports retired and took their knowledge with them
• Crystal Reports licensing has changed and renewal isn’t straightforward
• The underlying data model has changed and nobody knows how to update the reports

The real problem is that Crystal Reports often contain business logic — calculations, grouping rules, filtering conditions, derived metrics — that exists nowhere else. Replacing the report requires understanding what it calculates, not just what it displays.

What I do

• Audit of existing Crystal Reports — what they do, what data they use, what business logic they contain
• Documentation of report logic in plain language
• Data source analysis — what databases and fields the reports depend on
• Migration to modern reporting tools — SSRS, Power BI, Metabase, or custom
• Rebuild of critical reports in a supported, maintainable format

What I need

• The Crystal Reports files (.rpt)
• Access to or a description of the underlying data source
• An understanding of which reports are business-critical versus historical

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