A Crystal report estate should not be what holds your IFS Cloud move hostage
Every organization carrying Crystal Reports into an IFS Cloud upgrade faces the same wall: dozens or hundreds of .rpt files that someone has to rebuild in IFS Report Designer. Done by hand, that is months of consultant time — slow, expensive, and inconsistent, because every report gets rewritten by a different person on a different day.
The Converter reads each .rpt through the Crystal Reports SDK, maps the report structure into RDL, and produces a written review register for everything that needs human judgment — joins, record selection, complex formulas. Nothing is silently dropped. Your team starts from a working RDL file, not a blank page.
- IFS Cloud manufacturers still on Crystal who need Report Designer / RDL before 26R2. Crystal is present in 26R1 and removed in 26R2
- Crystal Server or Crystal license retirement initiatives
- Standardization on IFS Report Designer as the single report tool
- Estates too large for a manual rewrite to make economic sense
- Implementation partners needing repeatable conversion capacity
Three reasons upgrade programs buy this
Compress the timeline
An estate measured in weeks, not months. The mechanical work — layout, fields, groups, parameters, page furniture — is automated, so the calendar stops depending on how fast someone can retype a report.
Convert consistently
Every report is converted by the same engine with the same rules. No drift between consultants, no undocumented shortcuts — and a written review register instead of silent failures.
Pay for outcomes, not hours
Per-report software pricing agreed after an estate assessment. Implementation work, if you want the firm to run the conversion, is billed at a flat CA$150 per hour.
What the product includes
Extraction engine
Reads each .rpt through the official Crystal Reports SDK — sections, fields, formulas, parameters, groups, tables, and page setup — into a structured model. No reverse-engineered binary parsing, no guesswork.
Conversion engine
Maps the model into IFS Report Designer RDL: report sections become page structure, detail rows become bound data tables, groups become nested groupings, and simple Crystal formulas become RDL expressions.
Review register
Everything that needs human judgment — dataset joins, record selection, multi-statement formulas, charts, subreports — is flagged per report in a written register. The risky twenty percent is visible and assigned, not discovered in UAT.
IFS Report Designer handover
Converted RDL files are delivered ready to open, validate, and refine in IFS Report Designer — with a walkthrough so your team owns the result, not just receives it.
How a migration runs
Estate assessment
Every .rpt in the estate is inventoried and tiered by complexity — layout-only, standard, or complex. You receive the inventory, the tiering, and a fixed quote for the whole migration.
Pilot conversion
A representative set of reports is converted, validated in your IFS Report Designer environment, and reviewed together. The pilot proves the output quality before the estate commits.
Estate rollout & handover
The full estate is converted in tiers, the review register is worked through report by report, and your team is walked through the result so ownership transfers cleanly.
Suggested starting scopes
The Estate Assessment is a fixed CA$1,040. Pilot and estate software pricing are agreed after the assessment.
Estate Assessment
One working day. Full .rpt inventory, complexity tiering (layout-only / standard / complex), written migration approach, and a fixed quote for the estate. If you buy the Migration Pilot, this fee is credited in full.
Migration Pilot
Best for proving the conversion quality on real reports before committing the estate.
- Up to 10 representative reports converted
- Validation in your IFS Report Designer
- Review register walkthrough
- Fixed pilot fee, agreed after the assessment
- Estate Assessment CA$1,040 is credited if you proceed
Estate Migration
Best for full-estate conversions and for implementation firms running multiple upgrade programs.
- Full estate converted in complexity tiers
- Per-report software pricing agreed after assessment
- Implementation at CA$150 per hour
- Review workshops and knowledge transfer
- White-label model available for implementation firms as a sales motion to those firms. IFS Expert is an independent specialist, not an IFS partner.
Facing a Crystal report estate?
A one-day Estate Assessment is how this starts. CA$1,040, credited in full toward the Migration Pilot.