Pair Angles with Spreadsheet Server for Flexible Reporting
Working in restrictive conditions is tough, especially when your reporting software doesn’t do enough to limit those restraints. Finance teams are regularly tasked with creating operational reports for their own use or to share with other business areas (departmental expenditure, open invoices, performance against budget). A lot is riding on these reports, and you don’t want complex and inflexible reporting tools limiting your insights into the data.
Your team is often given this reporting duty, and they need to accelerate the distribution of actionable, operational reports and analytics. For mid to large-sized businesses, your Finance teams’ data needs are complex. Spreadsheet Server solves the core financial/GL reporting piece, but there’s still a considerable number of manual processes when it comes to operational reporting which expose organizations to risk. Without an operational reporting solution that is intuitive and truly self-service, these organizations suffer delays, high skill barriers for report creation, siloed data stores, and complicated report distribution processes.
Traditional business intelligence systems possess all the right features, but don’t play well with your financial data. They simply aren’t designed to work with your ERP data structures. You need a way out of the disappointing results that add pressure and sap time from your team. You need ERPsmarts.
What’s Holding You Back
Your ERP is likely too complex and inflexible to provide the operational reporting and analysis essential to driving fast, agile decision-making across the entire organization.
- Managing Multiple users and multiple tools is time-consuming and costly — Finance processes are interconnected, yet finance teams typically jump between multiple, unrelated, and disconnected applications to complete their workload – wasting time and duplicating effort. Multiple tools translates to multiple interfaces to learn, multiple tools to administer, and multiple connections to manage the same set of data sources.
- Generic tools come with long implementation times and no pre-built content that understands your ERP — Rolling out an unknown and unproven reporting tool that doesn’t come with out-of-the-box content and wasn’t built to work with your specific ERP often means a long, complex implementation process.
- Users can’t access the data they need, when they need it, and in a format that works for them – stakeholders within finance and other business areas lack access to timely, operational data to support day-to-day decision-making. Between manual processing, the volume of recurring reports, and slow distribution, decision-makers need a better way to produce, share, and consume operational reports.
Your Way Forward — Angles and Spreadsheet Server
Connecting Spreadsheet Server (SpS) and Angles brings insightsoftware’s ERPsmarts to your operational reporting process. With Angles, you can provide the same user-friendly, deep, transactional level access that your finance team loves with SpS for GL reporting, in a form that’s intuitive and accessible for the entire organization for operational reporting. Angles translates ERP complexity into user-friendly reports with rich, out of the box content that’s built for your ERP and designed to meet the operational reporting needs of the wider organization.
- Simplified and centralized account administration — Because Angles and Spreadsheet server will both live on the insightsoftware platform, combining these solutions will give you a single place to manage your users and allocate licenses, saving you time and effort. The benefits of the platform extend beyond those administering your systems; your users will enjoy a consistent interface, onboarding experience and a central point of access to both Spreadsheet Server and Angles.
- Low risk and short time to value — Work with the company you trust for your financial reporting—a company that intimately understands your ERP—Angles allows you to extend the same ERPsmarts you know and love from Spreadsheet Server to solve your operational reporting challenges. Give your team a head start with pre-built content packs, including interactive reports, visualizations, and dashboards purpose-built for your ERP that cover common financial and operational reporting needs. Get up and running immediately with no installation required. Combine ERP data with other sources to view the bigger picture.
Differentiator against BI tools that can connect to almost any source but lack context / understanding of the data — resulting in longer time to value.
- Accessible operational reporting for the entire organization — Spreadsheet Server gave you the tool you needed to understand your financial data, with Angles you can now provide all your stakeholders with a tool that does the same for operational data. Angles drag-and-drop editing, rich visualizations and intuitive interactivity allow business users to easily access and refresh their reports at any time so they can explore the latest data to get fast answers to their key questions. Now users can access data in the way that works for them: Finance in Excel, others through their browser.
It Is Time to Look Ahead
There hasn’t been a single, unified solution that combines ERP intelligence with modern analytics functionality for reporting needs. Until now. Get value right out of the box with Angles reporting from insightsoftware.
Many reports are required daily or weekly and only 11% of respondents to the survey were happy with the tools they use to create their reports (primarily Excel, Power BI, and native ERP report writers). Issues they cited included that it takes too long to create reports, existing tools are too complex to use, and they can’t drill into transactional data.
As a result, stakeholders within finance and other business areas lack access to timely, operational data to support day-to-day decision-making. Get value right out of the box with Angles reporting from insightsoftware. Angles is complete, connected, and intuitive. It’s pre-built dashboards and content packs allow your team to zoom past their current slow-paced reporting methods. Users don’t have to be experts, allowing anyone on your finance team to drill down into the data insights your team needs.
–
About insightsoftware
insightsoftware is a leading provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions. Over 30,000 organizations worldwide rely on us to support business needs in the areas of accounting, finance, operations, supply chain, tax, budgeting, planning, HR, and disclosure management. We enable the Office of the CFO to connect to and make sense of their data in real time so they can proactively drive greater financial intelligence across their organization. Our best-in-class solutions provide customers with increased productivity, visibility, accuracy, and compliance. Learn more at insightsoftware.com.