Crystal Reports Is Dead — What Manufacturing Companies Should Do Next

If your company still relies on Crystal Reports for invoices, quotes, packing slips, or purchase orders, the clock is ticking. SAP has been winding down the Crystal Reports product line for years, and the timeline is now concrete. For thousands of manufacturing companies running Epicor, SYSPRO, Sage, and other ERPs, the question isn’t whether to migrate — it’s how.

This post lays out the end-of-life timeline, explains who’s affected, and outlines what a modern replacement for Crystal Reports actually looks like.

The End of Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has been a staple of document generation in manufacturing for over two decades. But SAP has been steadily phasing it out:

• Crystal Reports 2016 — mainstream support ended December 2024. No more patches, no security updates, no legal compliance changes.
• Crystal Reports for Enterprise — removed from the SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 release entirely. If you’re upgrading your BI platform, your Crystal Reports for Enterprise reports won’t come with you.
• Crystal Reports 2020 — mainstream support ends 2026.
• Crystal Reports 2025 — the final release, with mainstream support ending December 2027. After that, only customer-specific maintenance at premium cost.

For companies still running .rpt files in production, this isn’t a distant concern. Crystal Reports 2016 is already unsupported. If you’re on an older version, you’re running reporting infrastructure with no security patches and no vendor support.

Who’s Affected

Crystal Reports is deeply embedded in the ERP ecosystem. These platforms either shipped with it, integrated with it, or built their document output around it:

Epicor Kinetic — With 28,000+ customers, Epicor was one of the largest Crystal Reports ecosystems. Epicor has been pushing users toward SSRS for years, and Crystal Reports does not work in Cloud Kinetic SaaS — there’s no mechanism to upload .rpt files in the cloud version. Companies migrating to cloud Kinetic are forced to abandon their Crystal Reports entirely.

SYSPRO — Over 15,000 customers worldwide relied on Crystal Reports as SYSPRO’s primary reporting and document generation tool. SYSPRO has introduced its own reporting alternatives, but many companies haven’t migrated yet.

Sage X3/100/300 — Sage integrations with Crystal Reports suffer from slow generation times and poor export quality. Companies frequently report formatting inconsistencies between screen preview and printed output.

Global Shop Solutions, DELMIAworks, and others — Smaller ERP vendors that bundled Crystal Reports face the same challenge. Their customers need to find alternatives, often with less vendor guidance available.

If your company uses any of these platforms and still generates documents through Crystal Reports, this affects you directly.

Why SSRS Isn’t the Answer

When Crystal Reports started its decline, many companies — and ERP vendors — pointed to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as the natural successor. Epicor, in particular, made SSRS its standard reporting tool and built the Report Data Definition (RDD) designer around it.

For internal reports and dashboards, SSRS works reasonably well. But for customer-facing documents — the invoices, quotes, packing slips, and purchase orders that your customers actually see — SSRS has significant limitations:

• No pixel-perfect layout control. SSRS was designed for tabular data reports, not polished business documents. Getting an invoice to look right requires fighting the tool at every step.
• Last-page footers are painful. A common requirement for invoices is to show bank details or payment terms only on the last page. In SSRS, this is surprisingly difficult and typically requires workarounds involving row counting and conditional visibility.
• Page breaks split content unpredictably. Multi-line item descriptions or grouped data frequently break across pages in unwanted ways. SSRS page break behaviour is notoriously hard to control.
• The RDD tool in Epicor frustrates users. Epicor’s Report Data Definition designer, built on top of SSRS, adds another layer of complexity. Community forums are filled with users describing it as difficult to work with, with crashes during design and no straightforward way to add user-defined fields.
• Requires Visual Studio and SQL knowledge. Creating or modifying an SSRS report isn’t something a business user can do. It requires a developer with Visual Studio, SQL Server knowledge, and familiarity with the RDL XML format. Every template change becomes an IT ticket — or a consulting engagement.

The result? Companies end up paying consultants thousands of pounds to create and maintain SSRS reports that still don’t look as good as what Crystal Reports produced. There are entire consulting firms — Datix, Olender, Tomerlin-ERP, 2WTech — whose business model includes Epicor report customisation, precisely because SSRS is so difficult for end users.

SSRS has its place for internal analytics and dashboards. But it was never designed to produce the kind of polished, branded, pixel-perfect documents that your customers see. That’s a different problem, and it needs a different solution.

What a Modern Replacement Looks Like

The world has moved on from desktop report designers and server-based rendering engines. A modern document generation tool should offer:

A visual, drag-and-drop template editor. Non-technical users — the finance team, the warehouse manager, the sales coordinator — should be able to design and update templates without writing code, without Visual Studio, and without filing an IT ticket. Changes should be instant, not a two-week consulting engagement.

API-driven generation from any data source. Instead of hard-wiring a report to a specific database view or stored procedure, you send data to an API and get a document back. This means you can generate documents from your ERP’s REST API, from a webhook, from a no-code automation tool, or from custom code — whatever fits your architecture.

Cloud-native with no server dependencies. No Crystal Reports runtime to install. No SQL Server Reporting Services instance to maintain. No 32-bit .NET dependency to worry about. Just an API endpoint and a browser-based editor.

Multiple output formats. PDF is the standard, but modern workflows also need DOCX for editable documents, images for email banners and social media, and plain text for legacy integrations. One template, multiple outputs.

Dynamic content with a familiar syntax. Conditional logic, repeating sections for line items, calculated fields, QR codes, barcodes — all the things that Crystal Reports could do, but driven by a modern template language that’s easy to learn and doesn’t require a proprietary designer.

This is exactly what TemplateTo was built to do. Design your template visually, send your ERP data to the API, and get back a pixel-perfect PDF, DOCX, or image. No servers to manage, no specialist skills required for template design, and no vendor lock-in to a dying product.

Migration Path: From Crystal Reports to TemplateTo

Migrating away from Crystal Reports doesn’t have to be a big-bang project. Here’s a practical approach:

1. Inventory Your Reports

Start by cataloguing every .rpt file in your organisation. Classify each one:

• Customer-facing documents (invoices, quotes, POs, packing slips) — these are the priority for migration to a visual template tool like TemplateTo.
• Internal reports (sales dashboards, inventory summaries, production reports) — these may be fine in SSRS or a BI tool like Power BI.

Focus your migration effort on the customer-facing documents first. These are the ones that benefit most from a visual editor and pixel-perfect output.

2. Recreate Your Top Templates

Open your most-used Crystal Reports in the TemplateTo visual editor and rebuild them. Most invoice and quote layouts can be recreated in an afternoon. You’ll likely find that the visual editor makes it easier to achieve the layout you want than Crystal Reports did, especially for modern design elements like branded headers, QR codes, and clean typography.

3. Connect to Your ERP’s API

Modern ERPs all have REST APIs:

• Epicor Kinetic — REST/OData API with BAQ support
• SYSPRO — e.net Business Objects and REST API
• Sage X3 — REST web services
• Sage 100/300 — Sage API

Query your ERP for the data you need (order details, customer info, line items), map it to your template variables, and POST it to TemplateTo’s render endpoint. The response is your finished document.

4. Automate with No-Code Tools

If you don’t want to write code, connect your ERP to TemplateTo through an integration platform:

• Epicor Automation Studio (powered by Workato) — built into Epicor Kinetic
• N8N — open-source workflow automation with an HTTP node for TemplateTo
• Zapier — simple trigger-and-action workflows
• Celigo — enterprise iPaaS with ERP connectors

Set up a workflow: when a new order is created in your ERP, automatically generate and email the invoice. No polling, no manual steps.

5. Run in Parallel, Then Cut Over

Keep your Crystal Reports running alongside TemplateTo for a transition period. Compare the output side by side. Once you’re confident the new templates match or exceed the quality of your Crystal Reports, switch over and decommission the old infrastructure.

Getting Started

If you’re evaluating alternatives to Crystal Reports, sign up for a free TemplateTo account and try recreating one of your existing reports in the visual editor. You don’t need to connect your ERP to get started — just design the template and test it with sample data.

For teams that want to see how TemplateTo connects to Epicor, SYSPRO, or Sage, get in touch via our contact page and we’ll walk you through it.

The Crystal Reports era is ending. The good news is that what comes next is simpler, faster, and doesn’t require a consulting engagement to change a font.