In order to provide the best opportunity for reporting information that is relevant to the clients, as well as managing optional report template settings, VRS has an integrated reference data module that allows virtual tables to be setup by power users to maintain data that can then be referenced by core parameter information and used by report designers and generators.

Reference data can be pulled in automatically through automated synchronization feeds or manually through the web front end.

The most likely reference data structure to be defined in VRS for client reporting would be one usually named Account – holding all the attributes of your client accounts you would need – account name, account id, inception date, strategy, etc. From this entity, all feeds from source systems can be driven through information held on here; if you have more than one system id for the same account in your enterprise systems then you would store these ids in this entity to allow data joins to be made without having to expose this complexity to the end user.

Simplified Report Design
Once defined and setup, VRS reports can use reference information automatically within standard reports or custom code without having to specifically pull in the data through report component data feeds.

Reference data can be used as parameters to data extracts or as additional fields to be displayed in the reports themselves, for instance, if you wish to render performance data for a portfolio but you also wish to display the portfolio inception date along with it – then the system will already know which portfolio you’re dealing with and so it will be able to pull out any detail about portfolio at the same time – i.e. the inception date.

Similarly, if you wish to know the details of the fund manager related to the portfolio, then references can be declared between portfolio and fund manager reference data to allow any detail about the related fund manager to be available too, all without the report designer having to think about these complexities, and all within a secure environment that will only allow access to data to those users that are allowed to view it.