Reporting Tool or Software for Printed Forms?

Question

We are creating a new HR application (.NET) that requires printing of complex forms (IRS documents, employment forms, pay checks, etc). Some of these would be printed on preprinted stock (i.e. W-2s) while others would need to save the formatting within the report/form design.

In our OLD legacy applications, we have used C programs to create PCL files to handle forms. This was a ROYAL pain. We're unsure what the best approach is today. We've tried mocking something in ActiveReports, but it seemed difficult to get the layouts correct.

How do other companies handle this? For example, what would you expect banks use to print complex billing statements, or to fill in pre-printed application forms?

Answer 1

Have you considered trying a 3rd party component vendor? I've heard good bits about Telerik's Reporting tools. Easy designing is their feature that they like to highlight.

Apparently you would be able to print/export to PDF or Excel (among others). There are intro videos and image galleries targeted to developers there on the Telerik reporting site.

Answer 2

I wouldn't go with a base reporting tool. Government forms are tricky beasts and I'd look for software that'll do it directly. I don't know of anyone producting .Net components that'll do what you need (and a quickie google/bing search didn't produce any), but there are a lot of products out there that let you import your data in a format of your choice (generally QuickBooks and CSV) for a perfectly reasonable price (~$40).

That's what we used back in the day (some six or seven years ago) when I needed to do a stack of 1099s on pre-printed forms for a small company every year. There was some fiddling with getting the right data into the CSV, but once we matched up the actual printing was a snap. It's not as automated as you are probably looking for, but the trade-off of having someone follow a simple procedure instead of messing with PCL positioning and formatting was well worth it.

Answer 3

Crystal Reports is a good solution for this. We used to use it for printing HCFA insurance forms. If you've never seen one, HCFA is like the grandaddy of all government forms for printing headaches. It allows exact positioning on a piece of paper. However, at least in past versions, when using Crystal you want to remove all guidelines before moving to production. Guidelines (at the last time I used it) can cause up to .5 inch variation in output from printer to printer. We found that we had no variation without the guidelines.

Another point is that there is always some very minor variation in print positioning from one printer to the next. It's typically less than 1/16 of an inch, which is within the tolerances of most government forms. However if that is not okay, you're in for a world of headache if you need to support different brands/classes of printers. This will be true no matter what software you go with.

As far as software to do it directly goes, it depends on the application. If you just need to dump out a few W4's then buying a package that prints from a standard format (.csv, excel, etc) to a W4 is probably going to work out okay. If you need to handle much more complex forms (like the HCFA), you will come out better by purchasing a professional reporting tool.

If it's a simple output, you'll be able to find cheap software that does it for you. Cost is going to relate directly to the complexity and number of different forms you need to support.

Answer 4

I have actually worked on a competitor product. I once worked on an online HR system that autofilled out I9's, W4's etc. We would take the actual PDF report and have a designer put PDF fields on the report. We could then use iTextSharp to populate the fields. The product was pretty slick as you could upload a PDF and it would pull all the fields from the report and auto create a form for the user to fill out based on the fields that were used on the report.