Reporting with Sage 50

Posted by John Stokdyk PM | on Tue, 11/08/2009 - 13:21 539 4 comments | report

We might as well kick things off with what must be the oldest topic in the management reporting book - how to get detailed management info out of Sage 50.

This post was inspired by the confluence of two threads, the revelation of yet more reporting enhancements to Sage 50 Accounts 2010, and an Any Answers posting asking for advice about the best way to go about expanding a product list to cope with multiple locations.

The person who posted the query seems to be confident enough about setting up a new product code list and extracting departmental reports from Sage, but wondered if there was an easier way to do it, or any pitfalls that lie in wait. Sage has responded to years of stick from the likes of me and David Carter and despite a few remaining customer niggles, its Report Designer certainly goes a long way to dealing with the criticisms raised.

One school of thought advocates using MS Access as a more reliable reporting engine, but elsewhere we're hearing about web-based business intelligence tools and dashboards that can pull in live data from several sources. Have you seen any evidence of changes in reporting behaviour - or experimented with them yourself?

Or do you think - as I suspect - that Excel, pivot tables and MS Query will still be the main vehicles for reporting for many years to come?
__________________________
John Stokdyk, Technology editor

Comments

Sage 50 Reporting

garykind | Tue, 06/04/2010 - 11:47 | Permalink

For most users excel reporting is probably the easiest way of reporting against Line 50 data. In my experience the report designer is still a little too painful for most users with simple changes requiring more time than they should. As someone who uses SQL reporting services extensively with both Sage 200 and 1000 this is a great tool as its web based and therefore easy to deploy. The downside is you need someone with expertise in the tool to create the reports, its not really an end user tool although Microsoft are working on this. I think with the imminent release of the mySQL version of Sage 50 using a 'server based' reporting tool becomes more viable.

Gary

http://www.domorewithsage.com

Reporting with Sage 50

jason.raikes | Tue, 06/04/2010 - 14:38 | Permalink

I agree with John in that Excel will be the reporting tool of choice for some time to come. I believe that the reason behind this is that staff are familiar and comfortable with this tool and find the learning curve and lack of flexibility of other tools too much to switch.

With this in mind, we at Pendragon Systems Ltd have developed DBReport. This gives a fully functioned, wizard driven report writer in Excel. The wizards take the user through a step by step process in building reports. The wizards remove the requirement to write SQL as the user is asked a series of questions from which the tool builds the SQL statement. Staff can benefit from there existing knowledge of Excel to rapidly build, format and deploy reports. Additionally, we have built DBSage which contains a number of pre-built queries on the Sage Line 50 data to present it in a format that can easily be used by DBReport.

More information and a 30 day free trail can be found at www.pendragonsystems.com/sage.htm.

MS query for Sage 200

krisman1 | Tue, 02/04/2013 - 05:34 | Permalink

I am trying to write a p& l report in excel by using ms query to include commitment accounting but finding it difucult to create such report.

Do anyone know which table to merge to acheive that.

Reporting with Sage 50

bro0010 | Sat, 18/05/2013 - 14:27 | Permalink

"Or do you think - as I suspect - that Excel, pivot tables and MS Query will still be the main vehicles for reporting for many years to come?"