The Generate Reports Screen ("Report Generator") is reached by clicking on the appropriate button on the Main Menu or choosing MAIN TASKS and GENERATE ROYALTY REPORTS from the Menu Bar.

Information About the Error Message: "There's a problem with the starting date..."

This message only appears if you have turned on the Running Tally feature.  It's telling you that the Starting Date that you've entered doesn't coordinate with the "As Of" date on that particular's royalty holder's set-up screen.

For example, let's say the "As Of" date on the Set-up Screen is 12/31/15.  The Running Tally feature, then, expects you to enter 1/01/16 as the Start Date.  Let's say you enter 1/15/16 as the start date.  The Report Generator will trigger the error message:  "There's a problem with the starting date…"  The reason it triggers the error is that you will be missing any sales that occur between 1/01/16 and 1/14/16.  If you sold any products during that time period, they won't be picked up by Running Tally and the running tally results will be inaccurate.

It is best to wait until some time after the royalty period to do your reports.  If you do reports at the end of the year, wait until December 31st has past before generating reports.  If you do a report on December 15, you may be missing some sales that occurred between December 15 and December 31.

Doing your report after the end of the report period also makes it easier to use the Running Tally feature.  The "As Of" date in the Running Tally is the last day of the report period.  When you run a report for the next year, your starting date for the Report Generator is January 1st.

The Running Tally feature is designed to have you produce royalty reports in order.  First you do the report from 1/1/15 to 12/31/15.  Then you do the report for 1/1/16 to 12/31/16, and so on.  As you do the reports, the running tally figure is updated on the Set-up Screen.  But if you jump out of order, then AnyBook is confused in how to handle things.

Let's say, it's 2016 and you want to go back and re-run a report for 2014.  Since you've gone out of order, AnyBook triggers the Running Tally Wizard to try to understand what you might be doing.  By following the directions on the wizard, you'll be able to communicate your purposes to AnyBook.  More information on the wizard is found here: Running Tally Wizard.  More information on Running Tally in general is found here: Running Tally.