*PLEASE NOTE: Since writing this blog, Sage Financials (previously known as Sage Live) was discontinued by Sage. Sage Intacct was the new replacement, which is a powerful, true Cloud accounting solution, learn more about Sage Intacct here.
Reporting in Sage Financials
With their cloud-based accounting, Sage has really been able to provide customers with extremely powerful reporting tools. Due to Sage Financials sitting as an app on Salesforce, Sage has utilised its host platform by integrating the reporting capabilities with Salesforce tools. The vast amount of reporting options within Sage Financials gives many different options for its customers to use. Let’s begin with talking through what reporting tools are available…
“2 is better than 1”
How about 5?! Yes, that’s right! Sage Financials offers the use of 5 different types of reporting tools, ready to use along with their Sage Financials user license. The fact that they offer 5 reporting tools is more than enough to impress, but the fact that they come included with your Financials license at no extra cost… Now that’s impressive!
So, what are these reporting tools?
Salesforce Report Designer, Sage Analytics Studio, Dashboards, Sage Financial Reports (Excel) and lastly Sage Intelligence.
Due to there being so many, we won’t have time to discuss all of them… For this blog, let’s focus on Sage Intelligence and its brilliant Budget Reporting capabilities.
Sage Intelligence
One of Sage’s most powerful reporting tools, in my opinion, is Sage Intelligence. Its main strengths include its Key Financial Reports, and the ability to amend existing reports or create new reports easily. You access Sage Intelligence within the Financial Reports tab as shown below.
Owing to its user-friendly interface, Sage Intelligence is a great option for all types of users. As like with the other tools, Sage Intelligence gives you default reports to choose dependant on different legislation’s within Sage. In this instance, we are going to be reviewing Budget Reports in the United Kingdom.
To enable reporting with Sage Intelligence, the tool will securely pull information from your Org allowing you to report on the data.
As standard Sage already provide us with an Income Statement that is comparable on Actual VS Budget.
This is a great place to start when looking to create custom Budget Reports, but we will talk about that in a bit more detail later on… First off let’s look into this standard Budget Report in a little more detail.
Income Statement – Actual VS Budget
The description provided by Sage on this particular report is ‘Displays balances per Account class per financial period for the current financial year, displaying actual, budget & YTD.’ I know right, quite a mouthful! To break that down this default report has been created to show a Financials user a comparison between their Budgeted and Actual Income. This report will look at companies actual Net Income based on their Operating Profit/Loss After Taxation and compare it with the companies budgeted figures.
A budget report such as this one is extremely useful for a business when making future budgeting decisions. Within Sage Intelligence the report layout is clear, giving the user a set of relevant and logical data. Another feature that is worth mentioning is that when you export a report from Sage Intelligence, the excel document will be in the same format as displayed within Sage. This means that if you ever need to manipulate reports in Excel, you can do so quite simply due to the formatting Sage provides.
Custom Budget Reports in Sage Intelligence
As promised, we are now going to look at some customisation of Budget Reports within Sage Intelligence.
Sage Intelligence makes the creating of custom reports a breeze! The report designer gives the user freedom to create reports that suit their individual needs through its ease of use and flexibility.
By using Sage Intelligence, customers have a lot of freedom to report on many attributes of their financial data. Using this reporting tool allows a user to report on dimensions, tags, profit centres, cost centres and everything in between. Having access to this level of detail enables a business to gain better financial insight and helps them make vital future business decisions.
An extremely useful component of Sage Intelligence is the capability of being able to “group select”. Usually, when building reports, it can be a very time consuming manual task. Sage has recognised the need to create reports effectively and efficiently and have provided a solution. When creating a custom report within Sage Intelligence you can pull in a default template e.g. Income Statement. To speed things up even further, you can add sets of information to your report as shown below.
Manipulation of data can be a difficult process when it comes to variance analysis… Not in Sage Intelligence though! Sage Intelligence uses similar formula fields to Excel, making it feel that little bit more familiar. Having the ability to use a formula to calculate variances across your reports heightens the quality of information a business receives.
How to become a Report Building Guru
Although Sage Intelligence is an easy to use reporting tool, it is recommended you undertake some training first. Training on Sage Intelligence will ensure that you are getting the most out of the system. It’s amazing just having the tool… but imagine having the tool and being able to use it to its full potential! Here at itas we offer in-depth report training across all of the tools Sage Financials has to offer. Upon completion of our report training, you will come away feeling like a report building Guru.
End of Report
Well, almost the end! I hope you have found this blog on Sage Intelligence insightful. If you are still unsure about what kind of tool would suit you, why not check out this blog. Should you have any queries, or would like to know more, please feel free to contact us.
Stephen is one of our newest members of the itas team, but this hasn’t stopped him already making a fantastic impact on the business. Stephen has over 3 years of experience working within a Finance role and has also completed all of his AAT studies. With Stephen’s knowledge and expertise he really has hit the ground running with itas. Stephen loves to write interesting blogs and endeavours to help all those in need with Sage.
In his spare time, Stephen enjoys keeping fit and maintaining a healthy social life in his home town of Chester. Stephen is always happy to help, so if you need anything, or would like to know more, please get in touch!