RSMUS.comFor optimized insights into both your current operations and future growth, your company needs both descriptive and predictive analytics. Sage Intacct, a cloud-based accounting solution, can help you access a range of financial and operational data with its own reports and dashboards. You can also use Intacct data to dive deeper by exporting it to a third-party solution.
Reports and dashboards in Sage Intacct
Using the report writers and dashboards within Intacct, your company can review data that leads to smarter decision-making. With the financial report writer, you can create robust reports that show balance sheets, income sheets, and cash flow. On the operational side, the Custom Report Writer is a wizard that allows reporting based on one object at a time. The Interactive Custom Report Writer (ICRW), available as an add-on, offers additional functionality when it comes to operational numbers and allows for in-report analysis such as conditional logic and rolling sums and aggregations.
The dashboard layer of Intacct is based on the reports you create and is customizable to each user. The dashboards provide good visibility into your data, revenue, and expenditures over time. However, if you change your customized reports, you will also need to update your dashboards, which some users consider a drawback. Whether you’re working from an office, the warehouse, or from home, you can see all of this cloud-based information in real-time.
For companies that operate in the retail space, wholesale distribution or keep inventory on hand for their clients, Sage Intacct Inventory Control offers reporting that illustrates data across locations, products, and inventory status, which can help you configure your warehouse operations to match your business. The data can be used to more effectively manage inventory levels and reorder points and quantities.
Third-party analytics solutions
There are two main reasons to build a reporting solution outside of Intacct. Your company may want to go beyond what’s available in Intacct for more powerful and advanced analysis. Or you may want to blend Intacct data with information from other sources, a common need.
A data foundation can be set up to draw data from any number of sources, including Intacct and Salesforce, for example. Once all this data is integrated, you can connect to a third-party reporting solution and easily see all the linked information, without having to be concerned about which system it came from.
When Intacct’s reports and dashboards are not enough, your company may want to use industry-leading data visualization platforms like Power BI and Tableau. Raw data from systems like Intacct, as well as sources such as Excel files, databases, and tables, can be pulled into Power BI and Tableau for basic modeling and transformation. With platforms like these, which have user-friendly interfaces, you can point and click and drag and drop to create the reports and dashboards you need to see.
Since Intacct is cloud-based, pulling data from it can sometimes be challenging, but helpful solutions are available in the Sage Intacct Marketplace. CData Software, a Marketplace partner, offers the Sage Intacct ODBC Driver that connects live data from Intacct to Power BI, Tableau, and other applications that support ODBC connectivity. Through this interface, you can read, write and update contacts, invoices, and vendors through BI, reporting, ETL, database, and analytics tools.
To find out more about how your company can make smarter decisions using analytics in Intacct and beyond, schedule a call with one of the experts at RSM today.
