Concur Cognos report duplicate expenses

[tbrinkmann]

I am running a report out of Cognos to show all expenses on expense reports during the specified timeframe, with the goal of running analytics to further analyze the data.  I have noticed in my analytics testing that I am getting multiple false positives, because if an expense report was approved with exception or has some other edit made to it, the same expenses on the same expense report will show up multiple times in the Cognos report I have generated.

On some expenses, it is clear which are duplicates, however, this is not the case for all.  In an attempt to avoid wasting time investigating multiple "duplicate" expenses which are truly resultant from edits the same expense report, I was wondering if there is a way to edit the report being run to only show each report one time, for instance, only the last iteration of the expense report which has been submitted.

I would hope this is a relatively simple change, however, I am new to Cognos reports and cannot find a way to make the change in poking around at the settings or from what I have seen in the help guides.

Please let me know if you have have any advice on how to make this change or if you need further detail.

Thank you!

Tim

[KevinD]

Tim,

Is this a report that you built yourself? If so, I may be able to help you a bit. Another question, does your company have our Business Intelligence buy up or are you using Analysis (free version of Cognos reporting)? 

Feel free to send me a private message on here. I'll await your reply. If you could, please send me your company name and the report name you are working with. 

Kevin

[S-Langdon]

Hi KevinD,

I was just looking through the posts and found this one, as I seem to be having the same issues as the OP.

I am new to Concur/ Cognos Reporting and have built a custom report within Business Intelligence (Report Studio) to show all expenses between specific dates, I have also built a number of additional filters into this as well.

• System
• Country
• Employee
  
• Approver
• Cost Centre
• Approval Status

I was wondering if I have caused the report to create dupliactes as it is looking at the multiple filters, or if it is something else, one of my colleges notices that the ones showing as duplicates is where there is a warning and attendee, which is what made me think it is the same issue as the above post.

Any advice you can give on this would be great
Thanks
Stephen

[KevinD]

Your filters shouldn't be causing the repeating issue. The way to get around this is to create either a repeater table or a master detail report. Unfortunately, these two types of reports aren't something I can type up here in this forum. 

The only thing I can do is direct you to our training guide: https://www.concurtraining.com/pr/reporting/resources. In this guide look for the topic Master Detail. This will walk you through how to create this type of report. The example in the manual is for Attendees. It will show the expense and who attended. However, the expense entry will only be listed once, you will not see the repeating line item. I hope this helps. 

Kevin

[Hisskitty]

Good morning. I am having the same issue with duplications. However, I am using Query Studio to create custom reports. I find that if I include comments, attendees and custom fields to show allocations I receive multiple duplications and it skews the total dollar amount. Is the Master Detail report available in Query Studio and if not is there something similar I can use?

Thank you.

[KevinD]

Unfortunately Query Studio does not have the capability for you to remove the duplicating lines for Comments, Allocations, etc. 

The Master Detail report can only be built with Report Studio. Does your company only have Analysis or is it that you just don't have the role to access Report Studio?