I have heard rumors that Epicor might be planning to introduce a new reporting tool, possibly Bold Reports by Syncfusion, but I have not found any official source to confirm this. Currently, SSRS is the primary reporting tool in use.
One scenario we are facing is a client who uses numerous Crystal Reports and is planning to convert them to SSRS reports. Given the large volume of Crystal Reports, this will take considerable time and resources.
If anyone reading this is aware of any plans for a new reporting tool from Epicor, could you please share insights? It might be more efficient for clients to move directly from Crystal Reports to a new reporting solution, rather than investing time converting to SSRS only to switch later.
Your valuable feedback and any information would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for the helpful update! It’s great to know that Epicor officially announced next-gen reporting in Kinetic for 2026, powered by Bold Reports from Syncfusion. Since it supports the SSRS RDL format directly, there’s no need to delay converting Crystal Reports to SSRS as these reports will seamlessly work with Bold Reports in the future.
I also agree and support this recommendation. If you are currently using Crystal, now would be a good time to start converting to SSRS as a first step towards using BoldReports. There is not an “easy button” for moving from Crystal to BoldReports.
We had a contractor do an SSRS report that reaches back into the Production Database to get some lot tracking information. Not a great practice of course since it will only work on-prem, security, etc. but should we start rebuilding that report? Specifically, will Bold Reports have an issue with it? Maybe too soon to know, but keeping an eye on our future backlog…
Yes, too soon to know… but, i would always consider it better to have the data sent to the report rather than the report go back to the database to retrieve more data.
Connecting to the DB in SSRS wasn’t just a “hack”, sometimes the RDD just wasn’t able to get you everything you needed for legitimate business needs… That said I have not looked at the BAQ as datasource feature in RDD and am curious if that has solved the need to go back to the database.
It can but sadly you can’t add a BAQ data source to the stock reports Epicor provides. So if the reports you’re talking about are based off a canned report you’re kinda stuck.
To do this, the SSRS Agent has to have read access. Anyone who could create an RDL could upload it and get any data they want - unless careful consideration was made to the tables and fields that the SSRS Agent had access to.
And if someone gave Write or Full access to the SSRS Agent, then Bobby aka
Robert'); DROP TABLE UserFile;--
Could do some real damage with their SSRS reports!
It’s not the direct access that matters, it’s which database is it reading.
In standard Epicor SSRS reporting, the data is extracted from the ERP database via RDD or BAQs and written to a separate SSRS database into tables of the form < TableName>_< id>. The SSRS Agent can only read that database with all of the extracted data.
The bad practice that Jose and Tim are talking about is having SSRS read the ERP database directly.
