Sage Intelligence Financial Reporting Recap
The goal of this session is to provide you with fundamental knowledge of key components of the Sage Intelligence Report Designer Module. If this is your first exposure to the Sage Intelligence Report Designer, this will be an overview, and for those that are currently using Sage Intelligence Report Designer, this will likely be a refresher of features.
What is Sage Intelligence Reporting?
Sage Intelligence Reporting helps to expand on current accessibility within Sage 300 Financial Reporting, by introducing Excel for its functionality and ease. This Excel add-in pulls data from across your entire Sage ERP System and creates a single location so you can slice, dice, and analyze the numbers in a familiar and user-friendly spreadsheet environment.
Report Design Process
As Sage Intelligence is 100% Excel-based it has the capability of tapping into multiple data sources through the Sage Intelligence Connector Module. Whether it's multiple Sage 300 databases or multiple data sources through the Connector we're able to establish what we call “data containers” and use those containers through the Report Manager. If you are currently on sage 300 version 6.0 or higher, you have access to one license for the Report Manager. The purpose of the Report Manager is to act as an administrator of the system, giving the ability to maintain, create, modify, delete reports and more. These are then translated into an Excel Workbook where then you're able to leverage Excel functionality, such as pivot tables or specific add-ins; as the demonstration will show how to utilize the Report Designer to build Financial Statements.
Intelligent Licensing components will be needed for those that would like to consolidate or combine multiple Sage 300 databases. For those that would like to connect to other data sources: the Sage Intelligence Connector Module is what you need, and this is a site license that would only require you to have one.
Reminder: one license of Report Manager is included with all Sage 300 installations; however, this is what we call a per workstation license.
While the Report Manager acts as the minimum of Sage Intelligence, the Report Viewer is used for those individuals who would like to have access to running the reports, enter their own parameters without needing to rely on other users. These individuals will require a Report Viewer License where they have access to a menu or a portfolio of reports. This is where they could run with the opportunity to enter parameter values; also licensed per workstation.
What is the difference between Report Manager, Viewer, Designer & Connecter?
The Sage Intelligence Report Manager can be seen as the foundation of Sage Intelligence while the Report Designer can be seen specifically for Financial Reporting. Report Designer is a site licensed and if you are on a subscription of Sage 300 this is included in your subscription bundle. Whereas Connector and Designer are site licenses, Report Manager and Viewer are per user; Sage Intelligence licensing model works in this manner per Sage 300 user, per workstation.
Report Designer Features
Formulas
- Opening Balance
- Closing Balance
- Actual
- Actual YTD
- Budget
- Budget YTD
- Current Year
- Current Period
- Company Name
- Quantity
- Account Description
- Structure Code
Clients often ask: is this difficult to use? Is this more difficult than Sage FR?
There are only 12 formulas, so the first question you need to ask yourself is: am I able to learn 12 formulas? But we could take it one step further, of those twelve formulas six are numeric formulas, that relate to building Financial Statements. The other six are opening balance, closing balance, actual budgets, month to date, and year to date. We're primarily interested in only closing balance, therefore, of these six you probably will only ever use a maximum of five; in the case you have budgets.
Reporting Tree
If you have multiple departments, cost centers, divisions, regions, locations, or basically multiple segments within your GL. There may be a need for you to report based on those segments, and Reporting Tree is a wonderful option to accomplish that.
As you can see in this in this screenshot, it can 100% adhere to your GL structure and you have the ability to build the structure that you need. Because we could easily rearrange and reorganize the reporting structure through the Reporting Tree; that does not require us to renumber our chart of accounts.
Dynamic Account Ranges
There are four sets of information that we have to create/setup in order to use Dynamic Account Ranges, and we will go through them each step to build our own within the demonstration because this is a Sage Intelligence Excel Add-In, whether it's Dynamic Account Ranges or whether it's any of the formulas, it uses the Function Argument Feature of Excel. We've seen this many many times, whether it's sum or index; whatever formula, this is the way that Excel looks and feels. Therefore the power of this is you could create one instruction line and have the system dynamically generate the list as you add or subtract accounts.
Sage Intelligence Training
BAASS offers business owners and other users of the Sage Intelligence products learning courses including Sage 300 Intelligence Reporting. The goal of these courses is to improve the overall knowledge and skills of Sage Intelligence and Excel, empowering you to spend less time capturing data, and more time gathering insights in reports that are clear, relevant, and drive decisions.
