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AIA

DBReport brings accounts data to Excel

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7th Apr 2010
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Taunton-based Pendragon Systems has produced an Excel add-in designed to improve the management reporting capabilities of Sage and other accounting systems.

DBReport is the brainchild of Jason Raikes, a KPMG-trained chartered accountant with several years’ consulting experience designing and implementing management reporting systems. Having surveyed the available tools – from corporate-level report writers such as Crystal Reports to bespoke reporting packs produced by previous generations of consultants to free-for-all spreadsheet systems – Raikes decided there had to be a better way to get data out of accounting packages.

DBReport is the result: “an add-in with all the functionality of report writers, or more, but purely in the Excel environment”, as he describes it. Priced at £200+VAT per user, DBReport will sit on any database: Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft Access and anything else with an ODBC driver, he said. An enhanced Consolidation Manger version is available for £500 that will pull in totals from several different accounting systems.

“DBReport is usually aimed at mid-tier organisations that probably have a database application, but aren’t happy with the reporting on it,” Raikes said. Users of the program include a structural engineering firm that uses it to extract montly project P&Ls from an old style ERP/project accounting system.

To expand the reach of the program, Raikes used it to develop a package of standard reports for Sage. “I worked with a firm of accountants who pointed out the weaknesses of Sage Report Designer such as its inability to have a multi-column report on both P&L and BS. That’s the major thing my tool will do that Sage doesn’t.” Like its parent, the DBSage tool also supports “drill-through” from the figures in a spreadsheet report to the sums that make up the total.

“When I did my accountancy training and consulting. The old auditor in me used to preach Excel was bad. But I’ve changed my tune - it’s actually what everyone wants to use,” Raikes said. “Excel is OK as long as you understand what its limitations are: don’t overtype the cells as that destroys the integrity of cells. Use it instead as a viewing window into the data.

“We use Excel because customers know it. Formatting is easier and it dramatically lowers the learning curve because it’s an environment people are familiar with.”
 

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