At Sage Intelligence, we believe in providing you with the right information to help you improve the running of your business, and give you back your time. One of the ways we do this is through the free Financial Ratio reports that you can access through our Report Utility. Over the past few weeks, we’ve created new Financial Ratio reports for a number of products which will give you the means to perform a health check of your company.
These products include:
- Pastel Partner version 14 & 17
- Pastel Evolution version 7.0
- Sage 300
The next two tips are focused on these reports. In this first one, you’ll learn how to access yours, if you’re not already sure, and then you’ll get some guidelines on setting up your benchmarking. This is also accompanied by a five-part webcast series on Financial Ratios. In the next tip, I’ll show you how to add additional ratios to the report.
Take note that these reports are Report Designer-enabled, and so a Report Designer license is required in order for you to use them.
Accessing the report
- If you haven’t done so already, download the Report Utility for your accounting/ business solution from here and install it. Take a look at the video on the page for instructions on the installation process.
- Open the Utility and click “Select None” to uncheck all the reports in the window.
- Then check the tick box next to the Financial Ratio report, and click download. Note that the name may differ slightly depending on your product.
- Once downloaded, open your Report Manager. You’ll find the report listed under the New Reports folder.
- Make a copy of it. This will ensure that the original is kept in a good state. Also note that when you make a copy, it’s a good idea to rename it straight away. Otherwise if you make a second one, the two reports will have the same name.
- Run out the new instance.
Setting up your benchmarks
In the report you’ll find a settings sheet. In it, you can enter a number of targeted ratio values. These are then used for comparison against actual values in the report itself.
If you’re not sure what to enter for the benchmarks, some suggestions include:
- Researching the standards for your industry.
- Look at historical values for your business and adjust them accordingly for the current year.
If you would like to watch the five-part webcast series on Financial Ratios, you can find them listed here. Also, remember to check out the Report Utility every so often as new reports are added on a regular basis.
