Why SSRS Isn't Working for Your Epicor Invoices (And What to Use Instead)

If you’ve spent any time customising invoices, quotes, or packing slips in Epicor Kinetic, you already know the frustration. The built-in reporting tools — SSRS and the Report Data Definition (RDD) designer — were designed for internal analytics and tabular data, not the polished, branded documents your customers actually see.

This post digs into the specific problems Epicor users face with SSRS, why so many companies end up paying consultants thousands to work around it, and what a modern alternative looks like.

The SSRS Problem in Epicor

When Epicor moved away from Crystal Reports, SSRS became the standard reporting engine. For dashboards, inventory summaries, and internal data reports, it does the job. The problem starts when you need to produce customer-facing documents — invoices, sales quotes, packing slips, purchase orders — the documents that represent your company to the outside world.

SSRS was never designed for this. It’s a tabular reporting tool that happens to export to PDF, not a document design tool that produces pixel-perfect output. The gap between what SSRS can do and what businesses need becomes painfully obvious when you try to create something as straightforward as a professional invoice.

The Report Data Definition (RDD) tool that Epicor built on top of SSRS adds another layer of complexity. It’s meant to make SSRS more accessible within the Epicor environment, but in practice it introduces its own set of frustrations — crashes during design, limited layout control, and a workflow that requires bouncing between RDD and Visual Studio for anything beyond basic changes.

What Epicor Users Actually Say

You don’t have to take our word for it. The Epicor community forums, EpicorUsers.com, and Reddit are full of users describing the same pain points:

“Am I the only one who finds standard SSRS report design a complete pain?” — This sentiment comes up repeatedly. Users who were productive in Crystal Reports find themselves spending days on tasks that used to take hours.

Last-page-only footers are a constant battle. A common invoice requirement: show bank details and payment terms only on the final page. In SSRS, there’s no native “last page footer” concept. The typical workaround involves counting total rows, tracking the current position, and conditionally showing content based on calculated page numbers. It’s fragile and breaks when the data changes.

Page breaks split content unpredictably. Multi-line item descriptions, grouped sections, and repeating data regions break across pages in ways that SSRS makes difficult to control. A line item that should stay together gets split across two pages, making the document look unprofessional.

Adding user-defined fields has “no easy way.” Epicor’s UD fields — custom fields that businesses add to standard screens — are notoriously difficult to surface in SSRS reports. The RDD tool doesn’t expose them intuitively, and getting them into a report layout often requires manual SQL or BAQ modifications.

The RDD designer crashes during design. Multiple users report that the RDD tool becomes unstable when working with complex layouts, losing work and forcing restarts.

These aren’t edge cases. These are the everyday experiences of companies trying to produce basic business documents.

Why Companies End Up Paying Consultants Thousands

The root cause is a skills mismatch. Modifying an SSRS report requires:

• Visual Studio — Microsoft’s full development environment, not a tool your finance team or warehouse manager knows how to use
• SQL knowledge — Understanding how to write queries, modify BAQs, and navigate Epicor’s data model
• RDL XML familiarity — SSRS reports are defined in an XML format that’s dense and unforgiving to edit by hand
• Epicor-specific knowledge — How RDD connects to SSRS, how to expose custom fields, how Epicor’s data relationships work

This means that business users can’t modify their own documents. Every change — adjusting a logo, adding a phone number to the footer, changing the column order on a packing slip — becomes an IT ticket. And if your IT team doesn’t have SSRS expertise (many don’t — it’s a niche skill), that ticket becomes a consulting engagement.

Multiple consulting firms exist specifically to help with Epicor report customisation: Datix, Olender Consulting, Tomerlin-ERP, 2WTech, and others. Their business model relies on the fact that SSRS is too complex for most Epicor customers to handle in-house. A single invoice template customisation can cost anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand pounds, depending on complexity.

This doesn’t scale. If you have different invoice formats for different customers, different regions, or different product lines, you’re looking at repeated consulting costs every time something needs to change. And you’re dependent on an external party for something as fundamental as what your invoices look like.

A Different Approach: Visual Template Editor + API

What if your finance team could design an invoice themselves? What if changing a logo, adjusting colours, or adding a new field took minutes instead of weeks?

That’s the approach TemplateTo takes. Instead of a developer tool that produces documents as a side effect, it’s a document design tool built specifically for producing polished business documents:

Drag-and-drop visual editor. Open your browser, design your template by dragging elements onto the page — text blocks, images, tables, repeating sections for line items, QR codes, barcodes. No Visual Studio, no XML, no SQL. What you see is what your customer gets.

Data-driven generation via API. Instead of hard-wiring your template to a specific database view, you send JSON data to an API endpoint and get back a finished document. The data can come from anywhere — Epicor’s REST API, a webhook, an automation tool, or custom code.

Non-technical users own their templates. The person who cares most about what the invoice looks like — whether that’s someone in finance, sales, or operations — can make changes directly. No IT ticket, no consulting engagement, no two-week turnaround.

Multiple output formats from one template. The same template produces PDF, DOCX, or images. Need a PDF invoice for email and a printed packing slip for the warehouse? Same template, different output format.

The difference is most visible in day-to-day operations. In SSRS, changing the position of a field means opening Visual Studio, finding the right element in the RDL XML, adjusting coordinates, redeploying the report, and testing. In TemplateTo, you drag the field to its new position and save.

How to Connect TemplateTo to Epicor Kinetic

Epicor Kinetic has a modern REST/OData API that makes integration straightforward. There are three main approaches, depending on your technical resources and preferences:

Option 1: Epicor Automation Studio (Workato)

If your Epicor instance includes Automation Studio — Epicor’s embedded Workato platform — you can build a no-code workflow:

1. Trigger: New Sales Order, AR Invoice, or Customer Shipment in Epicor
2. Action: Query Epicor’s REST API for the full record data (customer details, line items, totals)
3. Action: POST the data to TemplateTo’s render endpoint
4. Action: Email the resulting PDF to the customer, or store it in your document management system

No code required. The entire flow is configured through Workato’s visual recipe builder.

Option 2: Direct REST API Integration

For companies with development resources, you can call TemplateTo directly from Epicor Functions, a BPM, or external code:

1. Query Epicor’s REST API for order/invoice data (e.g., GET /api/v2/odata/Erp.BO.ARInvoiceSvc/ARInvoices)
2. Map the Epicor fields to your TemplateTo template variables
3. POST to TemplateTo’s render endpoint (POST /render/pdf/{templateId})
4. Handle the PDF response — email it, store it, or return it to the user

This gives you full control over the data transformation and the timing of document generation.

Option 3: N8N or Zapier as Middleware

For companies that prefer open-source or low-code tools, N8N provides a flexible middle ground:

1. Trigger: Webhook from Epicor, or a scheduled poll of Epicor’s REST API
2. HTTP Node: Query Epicor for the full record data
3. TemplateTo Node: Render the document
4. Output: Email, file storage, or any other N8N-supported destination

N8N is self-hosted and free, making it a good option for companies that want automation without additional SaaS costs.

Getting Started

If you’re tired of fighting with SSRS and RDD for your Epicor documents, here’s how to get started:

1. Sign up for a free TemplateTo account — no credit card required
2. Design your first invoice template in the visual editor using sample data
3. Connect to Epicor’s REST API using whichever integration method fits your team
4. Generate your first document and compare it to what SSRS produces

For broader context on why the industry is moving away from legacy reporting tools, read our companion post: Crystal Reports Is Dead — What Manufacturing Companies Should Do Next.

Your customers judge your business by the documents you send them. Invoices, quotes, and packing slips aren’t just paperwork — they’re a reflection of your professionalism. They deserve a tool that was actually designed to make them look good.