Sage Intelligence Reporting and Google Sheets integration: It is all about what is “familiar” for the customer

At the Google I/O conference, 18-20 May 2016, Google & Sage presented a prototype that allowed customers to create Google Sheets reports directly from Accounting (using Sage Intelligence Reporting Cloud). It also allowed the Google Sheets report to be automatically updated from Sage Intelligence Reporting Cloud based on customer or data changes while maintaining any Google Sheets changes (i.e. formats, charts etc.).

The technology behind all this is the Google Sheets API, which gives developers access to powerful features in the Sheets web and mobile interfaces, including charts and pivot tables. In the case of Sage Intelligence Reporting, it allowed us to create a Sheets report and push data directly into Sheets removing altogether the need to copy and paste.  In addition, we could update this same Sheets report with new data based on user driven changes in Intelligence Reporting.

For those who know Sage intelligence Reporting, this may all seem a bit strange given our success record using Microsoft® Excel® over the years.  So maybe we need to go back to the “why” of Sage Intelligence Reporting. We as a software company have always believed in giving back more time to the business owner and accountant. To do this we created software that allowed customers to use their familiar environment of Microsoft® Excel® to create reports. This meant no new learnings and Microsoft® Excel® offers more customization and freedom than any other reporting package. In addition, we have built in some powerful accounting, report creation and data tools to make reporting easy.

So why then Google Sheets? Well, we have always challenged the status quo and in one of our innovative “Dev days”, one of our developers came up with a prototype to integrate Sage Intelligence Reporting Cloud with Google Sheets.  We showed this to the Accounting product team who are going to be using Sage Intelligence Reporting as their reporting solution, and they had some interesting stats that showed a large number of their customers use Gmail, Google Drive and as a result, Google Sheets. This was their “familiar environment”.

Thus starting a collaborative effort between Sage and Google to get a feasible real-life scenario ready for Google I/O conference and beyond.  And now that the concept is now proved, where we go from here is unlimited.

It will be a new (but familiar) world for Sage Intelligence Reporting and our customers.

To find out more about the new Google Sheets API read the blog:  http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2016/05/apps-dev-sheets-api.html

Watch a video: https://developers.google.com/sheets/