Why would you use Excel to do that? (Sage ERP Accpac)
Posted by Glen Mund on Fri, Jan 28, 2011 @ 02:11 PM
We have recently begun to offer Excel training classes in our offices. The course is titled Excel beyond the basics http://www.plus.ca/microsoft-excel-/. The feedback has been excellent and several of the attendees are asking for more courses including more basic Excel courses.
What is curious to me is that the the popularity of these courses is due to the amount of data analysis the accountants, CFO's, CEO, controllers, sales executives, owners and senior executives perform with Excel. These individuals are looking for better ways of analyzing data with Excel functionality.
The problem is that to do this analysis the data must be moved from the application database to Excel via a report or an export directly from the database. This process often occurs every time the data requires to be analyzed whether that is daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. In more cases than not we find the amount of time being spent on the data export and the recreation of the analysis is significant.
Sage ERP Accpac bundles with 2 applications that allow for an Excel link to ERP data dynamically:
GL Financial Reporter: Allows for reporting on the General Ledger including analysis of actuals by any period with comparision to budget and drill down to the actual transactions.
Sage Accpac Intelligence: Allows for reporting on all Accpac data regardless of the module and can include data from any other database including CRM, HRMS, FAS and other independent databases as long as they ODBC compliant. This product also allows for consolidation of multiple databases and allows for reporting across products. A report could be developed that includes data from Accpac and CRM for instance.
Most importantly thought once the report is designed it does not have to be designed again so all the exporting and analysis work that currently takes place is eliminated.
Finally both these products or at least a good portion of these products are part of your Sage ERP Accpac 5.6 and 6.0 products at no charge.