SAGE ACCPAC INTELLIGENCE; BEYOND REPORT MANAGER, PART 1
Posted by Plus Consultants on Thu, Sep 09, 2010 @ 12:32 PM
by Leon Colton, leon@plus.ca
So what is Sage Accpac Intelligence (SAI), everybody asks these days, and do I have the intelligence to work with it? Well, to help you decide for yourself and instead of giving another definition of this great product I decided to build a simple consolidation report, over the course of the next few blog articles, which will provide you a trail on how to build your own more complex reports, using the power of SAI. So what is hiding behind the SAI Connector icon?
Let’s consider the following scenario, a company runs two Company databases for two separate locations, but uses the same suppliers and runs monthly Aged payable reports in each company. The management of the company would like to consolidate these two reports, but exporting them into Excel and then analyzing the data involves too much of ‘spreadsheet acrobatics’, besides how would you know which company which invoice belongs to, without adding more columns to the report? It is all possible, of course, but too time-consuming. Well, you can do it in Crystal Reports (CR), somebody says..that’s true, but CR can only work with one database at hand.
And here is the point – SAI has CR capabilities of working directly with data tables, but goes beyond it, in that it can consolidate various databases, and in a few different ways, depending on what you want to do.
Some people would like to compare SAI with other familiar products, in order to pin it down on their maps, and here is another comparison – Financial Reporter (FR) can produce G/L based reports, and even drilldown to details, but SAI can withdraw data from subledgers, where FR has no access. Similar to FR, SAI maintains formulas for specific financial data (such as Account Name "GLAMF"."ACCTDESC", or Fiscal Period - "GLPOST"."FISCALPERD"). More than that, SAI has its own set of canned Financial Statement templates, and I encourage you to explore them at your own time. In regards to drilldown, you can decide what level of details you want to drilldown summary figures (to be covered in future articles on SAI series).
Another great feature of SAI - having it’s own Launcher it can be accessed directly outside of Accpac and save you a Lanpak. In other words, a manager wishing to look up specific operations figures or review financial information doesn’t have to kick a clerk out of Accpac to access the reports.
Stay tuned for more detailed information about Sage Accpac Intelligence in the weeks to come and how you can better use this to get the information you need from your Sage ERP Accpac system.