David Carter's round-up of Excel-based report writers
Excel-based report writers are very easy to use. You open up a new Excel workbook and find that it now contains an extra menu. From this menu you can view the data in your accounts package and pull it into Excel, and with this comes many other benefits, such as:
Formatting - once the data is in the workbook you can use Excel to format it into a nice looking report for management – add bold, background colours, different fonts and so on. There’s no need to learn any new software to achieve this, just use your existing knowledge of Excel.
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PrecisionPoint for NAV
Don't forget the best data warehouse and business intelligence totally integrated with NAV - PrecisionPoint (www.precision-point.com) . It does things for NAV reporting that none of the other packages mentioned are capable of doing.
and M$ Access ........??
The use of Views (SQL Server) or Queries (Access) are much under utilised by software houses - they can wrap the various table fields into a simple 'flat file' approach for reporting
However if Sage L50 is being used and linked to Access then the relevant queries can be created very simply - thereby building ones own 'data mart' with no need to spend huge amounts on reporting apps. (In fact for Sage L50 it would only take a few days to actually write a generic report engine app capable of providing the necessary user friendly functionality)
and the advantage with this approach is that one can avoid the issues of:
'.. This 20% has to be pulled together into a separate file, then tidied up and made ready for reporting ..'
'why oh why' does Aweb consistently refuse to address M$ Access despite the fact that it is an eminently suitable tool in a lot of cases?
Rugged Logic
...and if you are looking for financial planning and cashflow then see http://www.ruggedlogic.com/