#AcumaticaTnT Vendor Spend by Month as a Line Chart

Thanks to Jay Geistlinger (click here) @jgeistlinger from AccuNet (click here) for coming up with the idea for this post. Jay demonstrated the Generic Inquiry and Side Panel portion of this at the AccuNet Forum (click here) earlier this week. The only thing that I'm adding is changing the Side Panel from a Generic Inquiry to a Dashboard Chart.

The end result looks like this:

In the previous screenshot, the left-hand side is a Generic Inquiry and the right had side is Dashboard as a Side Panel.

This is showing AP Bills grouped by month and displayed as a line chart so you can get an idea of what you've been spending on a particular Vendor each month.

How to do it?

1. Build the Generic Inquiry that will be the basis for the Dashboard Line Chart Widget. I called it Vendor By Month (GI640096) and there are two key things that I'd like to point out in the following screenshots. First, the Generic Inquiry is grouped by month to give it a nice clean look. Second, I wanted an entry for each month so that even the $0 months would appear which was a little tricky to accomplish, but that's why I included the DateInfo DAC. Make sure to click the PUBLISH TO THE UI button or it won't be available to the Dashboard Widget in the next step.

A couple of things to point out in the previous screenshots:

a. On the CONDITIONS tab, I got lazy and didn't build out a dynamic formula for setting the start month so I'll leave that to you to figure out. I just hardcoded 20241201 (December 01, 2024).

b. On the GROUPING tab, here's the long and ugly looking formula:

=CStr(Year([DateInfo.Date]))+'-'+Right('0'+CStr(Month([DateInfo.Date])),2)

c. On the RESULTS GRID tab, here's the long and ugly looking formula:

=CStr(Year([DateInfo.Date]))+'-'+Right('0'+CStr(Month([DateInfo.Date])),2)

2. Now we can create the Dashboard that's based on the Generic Inquiry. I called it Vendor Spend by Month (DB000043) and the key thing to point out here is that we're adding a Vendor parameter to the top. The following screenshots include both the Dashboard setup in the Dashboards (SM208600) screen and the Widget configuration settings. Make sure to click the PUBLISH TO THE UI button or it won't be available to add as a Side Panel in the next step:

3. Now that the Dashboard is setup, we can add it to the Vendors (AP3030PL) Generic Inquiry which is the Generic Inquiry on the left-hand side in the first screenshot up above.