Shared Data Reporting: Deep Excel Functionality Meets Web-Based Dashboards

September 27, 2023

Finance teams are no strangers to pressure. But now more than ever, challenges from both outside and inside organizations are testing your resiliency. Inflation, economic uncertainty, and swiftly-changing regulations significantly impact finance professionals. Every organization has roadblocks like budgetary restraints, data limitations, and clunky, manual processes.

Using the reporting tools ERPs provide can help streamline workflows and reduce timelines, but they’re often too rigid to offer the tailored reporting capabilities organizations need to answer specific business questions. When surrounded by challenges from both outside and inside the organization, how can finance teams overcome these challenges to gain the agility they need to thrive?

ERP-Native Reporting Stifles Agility

ERPs are complex, and you often need to go beyond what’s available with native ERP reporting to generate custom and ad hoc reports. These require technical expertise and forces finance teams to rely on IT or outside consultants. Ultimately, this causes backlogs of requests to pile up, stretching period-end reporting from days to weeks.

According to insightsoftware and Hanover Research’s recent Finance Team Trends Report, 24% of finance teams still find manual and time-consuming processes to be a top challenge as they struggle with disconnected systems and spreadsheet-based processes. Manual data exports dramatically increase the risk of error, and often the analysis is out of date by the time it reaches your stakeholders.

As your leaders aim to nimbly maneuver the business through troubled waters, they need up-to-date information and in a format that allows them to generate their own insights. Surprisingly, according to insightsoftware and Hanover Research’s report on operational reporting, 98% of businesses still distribute reports via a static PDF. Your leaders and stakeholders don’t need numbers on a sheet, they need to be able to digest that information and have the capability to drill-down behind the numbers to find the root cause of any issue.

What you (and Your Stakeholders) Need in a Reporting Tool

Static reports slow down the reporting process. As the volume of data captured increases, so does the challenge of accessing data and presenting it in a way that business leaders can easily understand and interact with. Inflexible reports will just result in more ad hoc requests to IT, so you need a way to deliver information with self-service capabilities that enable users to seek their own answers. When updating your toolkit, look for solutions that offer:

Self-Service Reporting

Self-service reporting capabilities foster agility within organizations. Put reporting into finance or relevant business users’ hands. This increases efficiency across the board by allowing finance and operational functions such as sales, HR, and supply chain to report without complex technical knowledge. When seeking out a solution, find one that features a library of pre-built reports so that users can gain value out-of-the-box without IT’s help.

By adopting self-service reporting, you can generate reports custom-suited to your needs while freeing up time from your IT department.

Rich Visualizations

Finance teams know the numbers in a report tell a story–but it’s much easier for non-technical viewers to understand when presented via visual elements. With intuitive tools and capabilities like drag-and-drop editing, you can give your non-technical report consumers the rich visualizations and interactivity they’ve been looking for. Web-based reports can be refreshed at any time, allowing your stakeholders to independently explore the latest data to get fast answers to their key questions.

A One-Stop Shop for Financial and Operational Reports

Different departments have different needs. While spreadsheet-based reporting might be right for one team, another might prefer a web-based experience that provides easy-to-generate dashboards and visualizations for operational reports.

As such, a combined solution that offers different ways to interact with the same data might be the best fit for your business. A tool that features the best of Excel-based financial reports and web-based operational reports reduces implementation times to enable fast, easy ad-hoc analysis that anyone in the organization can be quickly trained to use.

A Shared Data Reporting Solution

Insightsoftware now offers a brand-new platform capability that unites the power of two industry-leading solutions. This exciting new ability to share data between platforms allows you to create advanced financial or operational reports in Spreadsheet Server, then access them in Angles Professional for rich visualization and distribution on any web-based device (and vice versa).

Spreadsheet Server joins the familiarity of Microsoft Excel with the power of your ERP data. With Spreadsheet Server, you can:

• Create custom reports from any ERP module using queries from peers.
• Close your books faster with the ability to easily drill down to the data behind the numbers.
• Connect multiple data sources with no staging area or data warehouse required.

Angles Professional is a powerful tool for reporting and gaining business insights with a web-based experience. With Angles, you can:

• Convert raw data into rich visualizations and easily-accessible dashboards.
• Answer critical business questions quickly.
• Blend data for business analytics across multiple data sources.
• Leverage rich reporting content, cutting-edge BI, and advanced custom calculations.

The Value of Sharing Data on the insightsoftware Platform

Spreadsheet Server and Angles Professional enable you to create advanced reports in Excel and web-based tools using the same business views and data with speed, flexibility, and ease. Creating reports with Spreadsheet Server and accessing them on Angles Professional enables you to move beyond your native ERP reporting capabilities with pre-built content and ready-to-use business views that answer your most pressing questions–without having to rely on IT.

• Reduce time to value and enable fast, easy ad-hoc analysis and simple self-serve reports.
• Empower more of your business users with consistent Excel or web-based dashboard reporting.
• Leverage a scalable, web-based solution built to handle large amounts of data from multiple sources and applications.
• Share business views with built-in data security, governance, and compliance.

Ready to see how a combined solution can enhance your financial and operational reporting? Request a demo to find out more.