Sage Accpac Intelligence Reporting Tools

By now we hope you have heard about and are using or at least have seen a demonstration of the exciting new Accpac reporting tools in the Sage Accpac Intelligence (SAI) suite. The phrase “Business Intelligence” or “BI” has been around for years. In the past these tools have only been practical and affordable to large companies.

Thankfully today, the same tools used by major corporations, are available to you due to technology advances of the last few years. It is just in time as a recent study by Gartner Research that using better BI tools was among the top 5 priorities for small to midsize business today.

If you don’t really know what makes your business tick, what is working and what is not, where your revenue is coming from and how much it is costing to produce – then you need business intelligence or BI. With SAI you can pull data from multiple systems and present it in an easily readable form such as graphs, charts, and dials on screen-based “dashboards.”

With an easy to use BI tool like Sage Accpac Intelligence you can make smarter, more confident business decisions faster than ever before.

New Report Designer Module

A new component is scheduled to be available this summer for Sage ERP Accpac Intelligence—the Report Designer module. The Report Designer module was developed for the specific task of creating financial statements. It simplifies the complex process of financial statement creation, leveraging the power and flexibility of Microsoft® Excel®.

Fast, Flexible Financial Reporting

The Intelligence Report Designer module has been developed to allow you to generate financial statements from predefined lists in seconds. You can edit existing financial report layouts or create new ones using simple drag and drop functionality for total financial report design flexibility. A what-if analyzer also is included, so you instantly can see the impact on an area of your business by changing a set of values on your reports.
Report Templates

Report Designer module comes with five templates to help you get started quickly. There are three different income statement formats, a balance sheet, and a trial balance. Two versions of each template are included, one for single-company financial reports and one for consolidated multi-company reports. It is easy to transform Excel data into meaningful information using Report Designer’s flexible tools.

Integration Tools

Special options have been built into the Report Designer module to facilitate the special needs of financial reporting. A graphical mapping tool lets you easily create a relationship between the Account Groupings in the accounting system and the Intelligence Report Groupings, assuring your reports meet GAAP requirements.

With the release of the new SAI Report Designer module creating dashboard, financial reporting, sales and operation management templates is easier than ever before.  With this Excel based tool you can get detailed, real-time intelligence through multi-dimensional data analysis and dynamic charts showing Key Performance Indicators.

In summary, SAI provides a user-friendly Excel interface to create and modify Financial Reports using a simple drag and drop, point and click interface, the average to advanced Excel user can create Accpac reports without needing programming skills. The reports are dynamic and can be update as Accpac data is entered. Here is a summary of the various components of Intelligence and how each one can be used.

Report Viewer

The moderately priced Report Viewer license is what you will want for your staff members who need to run reports but do not need to design or modify them. With this license you can access real time data in predefined report formats. Results are presented in familiar Excel style, and include dynamic drill-down capability. You select the various parameters for the report, such as date ranges and filters each time you run them.

Report Manager

The Report Manager license allows you to copy, edit, and save your transactional reports and lists and to create new reports. You are able to add or change report columns, report filters, and report parameters, as well as sort, drill down into, and aggregate data. You also can schedule, file, publish, and distribute your reports. This component also includes Report Viewer functionality, and you can access the Report Viewer right from within the Report Manager. Current Sage Business Care customers running Sage ERP Accpac v5.6 and v6.0. are eligible to receive a Report Manager license and a Security Manager as a benefit of their subscription plan.

Connector

The Connector component is useful for organizations that need to access information from multiple sources and consolidate data from multiple companies. It provides unlimited connectivity to ODBC data sources including unrestricted access to the ERP database, across all tables, fields, and modules, including SageCRM, Sage Abra, and Sage FAS, in addition to Sage ERP Accpac.

Analysis

This module is highly effective for analyzing large volumes of data using the pivot table capabilities of Excel. It is ideal for identifying trends and patterns in large volumes of data over multiple years, such as sales history. It comes with Financial, Sales, and Inventory OLAP cube reports.

Report Designer

As we have discussed, the Report Designer incorporates the specialized functionality needed for financial report creation. Report Designer requires Microsoft Excel 2007 or newer in order to run.