We among other U.S. businesses have been tasked with providing economic census data to the federal government.

This data is based on physical location where we conduct business. We have over 800 stores, which means 800 forms to fill out.

I'm curious to know what methods you are using to provide this data?

We have in the past used a combination of shell scripts, cobol programs, add-ins, sql queries etc.

The forms are new this time around and I don't want to take the time to write a cobol program for something we do once every five years.

We're looking into another method utilizing lawson report writer and account groups (RW40.30) that consist of all the gl accounts that make up the "Census Use Codes" located on the census form FI-52205 (Item 22). Once the account groups are defined, we would setup a RW100 report to pull Company, Acct_Unit,Acct_Group 2008_Beg_BAL. Once this is done we would export to csv and paste the data into the electronic reporting form the censu bureau provides and we're done until 5 years from now when we have to do another census report.

We haven't done this yet, but if anyone is required to do an economic census this year, I'd be grateful if you could share your methods.

Thanks,
Mark