If you’ve been using Sage Pastel and Sage Evolution for a couple of years, you may remember how much of a struggle it was to create your reports in Microsoft® Excel®. To make it easier for you, Intelligence Reporting (previously known as the Business Intelligence Centre (BIC)) was added as a module in Sage Pastel and Sage Evolution in 2005 (back in the “Softline” days), and since then it has eliminated manual reporting giving you the information you need at the click of a button. To make creating reports even easier for you, we’ve added a new financial Report Designer.
With finance being one of the main divisions tasked with reporting in most companies, financial reporting has always been a key focus area for us. The Management Pack report gave you a choice of Excel layouts to view your Income Statement and Balance Sheet in, but it required you had good Excel skills for customisations. In 2010 we launched the Excel Genie giving you an Excel wizard to help customise your report layouts.
This year we’ve aimed to take your financial reporting experience to the next level with the introduction of the Report Designer which gives you full control of your financial reports. The Report Designer is available for Sage Pastel Version 14 and Sage Evolution Version 7, if you’ve recently upgraded I highly recommend you give it a try.
The Report Designer gives you two options for working with your financials dependant on your Excel skills:
- If you’re still getting used to Excel, the Report Designer’s Layout Generator is easy to use and automates the design and generation of simple financial report layouts quickly and accurately in Excel.
- If you’re quite familiar with Excel, the Report Designer’s Task Pane provides you with a 100% Excel reporting experience. It provides you with instant and dynamic access to data within your General Ledger. Starting with a blank spreadsheet you can simply drag in data lists, formulas, or Reporting Trees from the Task Pane in your Excel window and the In-Memory technology will update results instantaneously.
In the early days when some of our customers saw the software run out for the first time we used to call it ‘the BIC lunge’. They would lean forward in disbelief seeing what had previously taken them days to do, if not weeks, run out in literally a few seconds! You may have also experienced this! We’ve recently hosted sessions to teach your business partners about the Report Designer, and we’ve been just as impressed with their reactions!
To learn more about the Report Designer click here if you use Sage Evolution, and here if you use Sage Pastel Accounting.
Want to find out how you can get started with the Report Designer? Call us:
Sage Pastel: +27 11 304 3600
Sage Evolution: 0861 EVOLUTION (386588)
