Management reporting: Is there an alternative to Excel?
Excel has become the software Swiss Army Knife of accounting, but Patrick O’Bierne started a stampede in our ExcelZone discussion group when he asked what other solutions people used to automate and rationalise monthly reporting.
O’Bierne (aka Excel author and EuSpRIG stawart sysmod) described the typical scenario that faces many accountants: every month they have to download data from a variety of databases (accounts, sales and so on); they then spend days copying, pasting, sorting, filtering and manually re-classifying data to get it into the shape they want. Then someone will want to see a different view, so for a set of accounts structured in 4-4-5 periods, one department might want to see reports by calendar month, while another wants 13 four-weekly periods. Or one consumer may want an analysis based around different groupings than the main chart of accounts.
There are data query tools such as the popular Crystal Reports, but in O’Beirne’s view “that just gets the data”. What working accountants need is something to automate the slicing and dicing. How to people cope in the field, he wondered.
As might be expected, the question attracted numerous suppliers of Excel reporting tools and Add-ins.
AccountingWEB members can help clarify the issue by putting forward their real-world experiences and reporting techniques in comments on this article, or in the ExcelZone discussion group.
If this is a topic that continues to cause you problems, the following AccountingWEB materials can help:
- An introduction to Excel-driven reporting tools (2006)
- Improve your reporting skills with self-teach tutorials
- Want to learn about Excel pivot tables? Start here
- Subscribe to the monthly ExcelZone eBulletin (registered members can click the My Subscription link in their Profile panel, above left).
Continued...
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A Business Reporting Alternative
Crystal Reports and Cognos are some of the most popular and widely used reporting solutions in the world. Yet why are so many people frustrated with them?
To answer this question you must first understand that there are two types of Business Intelligence reporting users: casual users and power users. Casual users, which typically make up 80% or more of the people in an organization, include executives, managers, staff, and business analysts. Power users, making up less than 20%, include IT developers, super users, and analytical modelers
Power users have no problem working with Crystal Reports or Cognos because they understand database design, structures, relationships, joins, and SQL commands. To a casual user, on the other hand, this is all Greek to them. This is where the first point of frustration comes in: casual users don’t have the time to learn Crystal Reports or Cognos nor do they want to become programmers.
So now the casual user must go to the power users to get the reports they want. This creates a second point of frustration: the “IT Bottleneck”.
The IT department is already overloaded with installing upgrades and patches, dealing with hardware issues, network support, software development, bug fixes, and more. Writing end-user ad-hoc reports is the lowest priority. The casual users can’t get what they want when they want it.
Stonefield Query: the BI reporting alternative
Stonefield Query is designed specifically for the casual user. It gives them the ability to create their own ad-hoc queries and reports, production reports, and parameterized reports from scratch without needing to know anything about programming.
Stonefield Query lets you produce row and column reports, cross-tab reports, charts/graphs, labels, etc. It works with virtually any database including: Oracle, SQL, DB2, MySql, Sybase, Pervasive, and more. It also comes with built-in scheduling. Stonefield Query can even run Crystal Reports.
Bottom line: give a casual user a BI tool designed for them.
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My experiences....
I've had experience of both.
I was lucky enough to work on a project that introduced a high-end data warehouse software, that allowed you to slice and dice information any which way you chose. Input came from not only accounting packages from 3 different global sites, but also a time-management system for the same 3 sites.
It was a great package, and saved much time and effort for me. The scope for its uses both in financial and management accounting was fairly wide, and the margin for error in the report was minimal, excluding error at data input. The fact that report templates could be held centrally, and re-run at will by anyone meant if someone was off ill or on holiday, the report they owned could be readily accessed.
At the other end of the scale, there is the Excel-based reporting, extracted from the accounts package. This is the reality for many SME's. I try and limit the amount of intervention once the data has left the accounts package. If errors are detected, corrections are to the data is made in the accounting package itself, and then re-extracted. If there is a requirement to analyse data for management purposes, I try to capture it in an analysis field in the accounts package if possible. I then use mapping techniques coupled with sumif formulas / vlookup / hlookup/ pivot tables as appropriate to produce the reports.
In both cases, the Garbage In-Garbage Out is a very valid argument . It is important to have "clean" information, that is coding either to account codes or analysis code is accurate as possible. It is also important to understand what information you need, why you need it, how best to capture it and what you are going to do with it before going ahead and capturing it in any system.
Hope the above helps .