Get your free time back with an automated reporting solution that works for you

One of the biggest frustrations heard from customers relating to the use of their accounting or business management solution (BMS) is that of reporting, or rather the lack thereof.

We could go on listing the explicit frustrations shared over the years relating to reporting, however the most common challenge above all else is usually along the lines of, “All I want to do is tweak my sales report to include the document date, or to show which products are moving the fastest—oh, and did I mention that I want to do this without having to attend a programming language course over several weeks?” Seems like a reasonable request, doesn’t it? Yet the majority of business solutions in the market often make these small changes incredibly challenging for the average businessperson to do themselves—without involving IT. The end result being one, or even all, of the following:

1. A frustrated customer without access to all of the information needed to make a sound business decision.

2. An expensive and time-consuming report writing task handed to IT, often involving Crystal reports.

3. A time-consuming and manually-repetitive task of exporting the report to Microsoft® Excel®, and then manually configuring it as required.

In our vast amount of years being involved in the Business Management Solution software market for small and midsized businesses, we have found points one and three to be the most prevalent complaints amongst them. The cold hard fact is that people love Excel, they are comfortable with it, and it is undisputed as the number one application for sharing and analyzing business data. Gartner said it best at one of their business intelligence (BI) summits when they stated, “Efforts to stop Excel BI uses are futile.” (Read the full article here.)

But why does wanting to perform such simple tasks have to be so complicated? Well, actually, it doesn’t have to be. Not with Sage Intelligence Reporting. Most popularly known for its proficiency in financial reporting, Intelligence Reporting is an extension of various Sage accounting and business management solutions. It automatically delivers trusted, real-time information from your Sage solution into pre-formatted, fully-customizable Excel report templates. Much like the one below:

With Intelligence Reporting, you can create dynamic dashboards that allow you to view detailed information about your Key Performance Indicators at a glance.

“How long does it take to learn how to use Intelligence Reporting?” We hear you ask. Just as an onion has many layers, there are different ‘layers’ or levels of using Intelligence Reporting. The first layer of Intelligence Reporting, which is simply running and customizing a report, is very easy—you don’t need any training at all. All you need to do is select a report from the list of ready-to-use reports that come with the solution, click the Run button, and your business’s data will be automatically delivered, real-time, into a pre-formatted, fully-customizable Excel report. You can make changes through an intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, such as dragging in the document date from the available fields list, reordering the report by product to see your fast moving items, changing the font, adding a graph, you name it. What’s more, your changes can then be saved back to your report with a single click of the mouse, meaning the next time you run the report, the changes you’ve made will have been saved.

“Now we’re talking! So what about peeling back some of the other layers of the onion?”

There are so many insights into your business you can gain and opportunities you can uncover with Intelligence Reporting that it would be impossible to list them all in one blog. Chat to your Mantralogix consultant if you would like to find out more about how you can get your free time back with a Sage reporting solution that works for you.

Sage solutions Mantralogix currently offers Intelligence Reporting for:

• Sage X3

• Sage 100

• Sage 300

• Sage 500 ERP