Business Reporting with Excel
Business reporting has come a long way, but isn’t it time to move ownership away from the company whiz-kid, or if you’re fortunate enough to have one, the IT Department?
What if control could be given back to where it belongs, in the hands of the person producing the report? But before you dig out your old programming manual, read on, the answer may be closer than you think.
Microsoft Excel is the de facto language of business planning, reporting and analysis. For over a quarter of a century financial managers have relied on spreadsheets to number crunch, analyse and forecast. Excel is the tool of choice for good reasons – familiarity, accessibility, functionality and usability. No other reporting solution can match Excel’s ability to format, enrich and enhance the look and feel of reports, budgets, plans and forecasts. There are solutions today that ‘integrate’ with Excel, but in reality this varies from data extraction to re-keying. This is still time consuming and problematic; a breeding ground for errors and inaccuracies. Yet the answer seems simple, you need a reporting tool that leverages the benefits of Excel with accessibility to your business data; one that overcomes the limitations, dynamically refreshes the data and allows you to select the data you want in plain English. Once you have the data you need, you want to be able to refine and present it, making full use of Excel capabilities: formatting, charts and graphs.
Bin the Programming Manual
Imagine, all this, even to the extent of putting Cube Analysis (the ability to turn and view data from different aspects at the click of a button) within the grasp of the non-technical user. What would be the impact on your company? How many days, or even weeks, could be saved each month in preparing reports when the effort of preparing them once can be offset by updating them the following month with the click of a button?
Once the problems associated with making the data available in the most efficient manner are eliminated, making use of Excel is a logical choice. Thanks to solutions like XRL, all this is achievable today.
So bin the programming manual, pick up the phone and ask your Pegasus Partner for a demonstration: seeing is believing.
