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Put Business Users in Control of Their Reporting

Take reporting out of the hands of IT, highly trained statisticians, data scientists, or third-party consultants, and make it accessible to regular business users.

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ERPsmarts

Hide the technical complexity of the underlying data source, so business users can create reports without relying on IT.

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Pre-Built, Configurable Templates

Get up and running fast with pre-built, configurable reports that tackle your most common and challenging reports.

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Drill Into Detail

Navigate seamlessly from summary to detail data to home in on areas of interest and get fast answers to business questions.

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Excel or Browser Access

View data in the way that works best for you. Excel or a web-based dashboard – it's your choice.

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Direct Source Data Connectivity

Refresh your reports and dashboards at any time to ensure you always work with the latest data straight from the source.

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Commentary and Collaboration

Chat, share, and collaborate to increase productivity and develop a shared understanding of your numbers.

Eliminate Reporting Delays

No more waiting for reports to be created for you. No more back and forth with IT when the report doesn't meet your needs the first time around. Take control of your reporting destiny.

80%
Finance leaders feel over-reliant on IT
90%
Finance professionals struggle to create at least one report
50%+
Take over 4 hours to create a least one recurring report

2022 Hanover Research - Operational Reporting Global Trends Report

Get Faster Answers to Business Questions

Whether you need to create a report from scratch, adapt an existing template, or filter and drill down through a pre-built report, when you are not relying on someone else to provide the information you need, you are in control. Self-service reporting puts you in control, ensuring you can get timely answers to your most pressing questions.

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Reduce the Cost of Creating Custom Reports

Specialized skills are in short supply, so relying on technical experts with deep knowledge of your source system data structures to create your reports is expensive. Implementing a self-service reporting tool that presents data in a way that makes sense to business users removes the reliance on technical experts, drastically reducing the cost of custom report production.

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Eliminate Reporting Bottlenecks

Depending on IT or specialists to support your ad-hoc reporting requests is a slow process. They handle multiple simultaneous requests from colleagues across your organization, delaying report delivery. Often, IT-generated reports will need to go through several iterations before they fully meet your needs, further increasing your report turnaround. With self-service reporting, you get the information you need right away without having to involve IT.

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Products

Self-Service Reporting Options for Your Source Systems

Discover the self-service reporting option that is right for your organization. These products form part of insightsoftware’s portfolio of unified, modular applications. By bringing together multiple insightsoftware applications in one place you can address your business needs faster and with less risk, by picking and choosing the capabilities you need across reporting, budgeting and planning, and controllership.

FAQ

At any time, especially during economic uncertainty, predicting every report or piece of information a decision-maker will need is impossible. It is unrealistic to expect IT experts or other specialists to service these ad hoc reporting needs. It takes up too much of their time. By the time they have serviced a request, it’s often too late, and the decision was already made, so the information is no longer required.

Self-service reporting is the antidote to traditional, IT-centric report creation. It puts the business user in control. It enables them to access the information they need to satisfy pressing questions. Self-service reporting requires tools that provide a business-friendly view of data and an intuitive interface to lay out reports and navigate their data. For some users, like the finance team, the optimal interface is Excel, whereas others prefer a drag-and-drop web interface.

Self-service reporting sits along a spectrum, depending on the business user’s needs. At one end, we find business users who need to create custom reports from scratch by working with a business-friendly layer that hides and manages the underlying database’s complexity. At the other extreme, we find busy executives who just want to take a pre-build report or dashboard and easily filter the data and drill down to home in on an area of interest. Each type of user is getting what they want, fast answers to pressing questions, without the help of IT.

Implementing self-service reporting helps an organization to become more agile. That is because business users now have timely access to the information they need to support decisions, enabling them to act confidently. Empowering business users with self-service access to information raises the decision-making bar because more people are making better and more consistent decisions.

Self-service reporting offers a more efficient way of tackling custom reporting needs. Business users can quickly satisfy their needs without waiting on IT or other specialists to help with their requests. This approach means IT teams are no longer overwhelmed by requests for information from across the organization. With more time to spare, these IT experts can focus on other high-value activities.

Dealing with constant requests for new information from across the business can be exhausting and overwhelming for already overstretched IT teams. Self-service reporting offers IT the promise of gaining back valuable time while being confident that the information business users can now access is accurate, up-to-date, and consistent.

For financial and operational reporting, direct access to the underlying source system is critical to ensure business users are able to address day-to-day decision-making with the latest information. The reporting system should come pre-configured with a business view over top of the source system. These business views ensure a short time to value and de-risk the implementation as the hard work of linking together potentially thousands of database tables has been done for you.

The ability to drill down from summary to detailed transaction data is another critical capability to enable users to get to the root cause of any issues they are investigating. The system should also be easy to use and require minimal training. For some users, working in Excel, a tool they already know and love, is ideal; others may prefer an intuitive, drag-and-drop web interface.