Why You Should Replace Excel with an Enterprise Reporting Tool

by Dean Huber | Sep. 14, 2022

There are hundreds of financial reporting tools, but the number one tool remains Microsoft Excel. There’s a good reason over one billion users rely on Excel – it’s easy to learn and use and readily available on most devices. But just because it’s the most common reporting tool does not mean it’s the best.

I’m not suggesting you abandon Excel.  On the contrary, Excel has its place. But for maintaining, compiling and reporting on your company’s financial health – there’s a better way.

Allow me to share some of the reasons why you need an enterprise-level reporting tool for your business.

Exposing Excel’s Weaknesses

Nothing is wrong with Excel. It’s a great personal data analysis reporting tool – fast, familiar, and easy. From its built-in templates that make calculating your home mortgage a breeze, to compiling lists and sorting data Excel has incredible power and benefits. But it is not an enterprise reporting tool. Why might you ask?

  • Mistakes are inevitable
    Studies by PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG find nearly 90% of spreadsheets have errors. And those errors can be extremely costly.
  • Stale data
    Without real-time input and refresh, reports are outdated the moment they are produced.
  • Cumbersome complex reporting
    Basic report production is simple, but producing multi-sheet, linked reports takes experience, talent, and training, not to mention the time spent maintaining that data.
  • Excel doesn’t like to share
    Sharing Excel reports is a manual process, inhibiting collaboration and timely data access.
  • Version confusion
    Often leading to multiple versions of the same spreadsheet and confusion as to which is the latest and most up-to-date.
  • What you don’t know CAN hurt you
    Hidden cells can affect the accuracy of a spreadsheet and the impact is magnified with multiple versions of the spreadsheet. One corrupt formula can have a ripple effect.
  • No audit trail
    Fraud is difficult to detect and prevent because the data can be easily changed.
  • Just plain inefficient
    Somebody (or somebodies) must spend the time to build and maintain each of the spreadsheets used, which typically involves a great deal of duplicate data entry.

Another Option

What organizations need from their financial reporting is current, reliable data that is easy to create, simple to customize, and readily shared.

Sage Intacct provides the best financial reporting of any accounting system. It manages operational and financial data across your organization. From sales to purchasing, inventory to payroll, it is a single source of truth providing quick access to reports. Run high-level reports to drilling down to a single transaction provides confidence to make critical decisions without exporting to Excel and manipulating the data.

Sage Intacct is an enterprise reporting tool, with functionality to prove it:

  • Guided user interface
    Build a new report from scratch, customize an existing report, or modify one of the 150 out-of-box reports.
  • Dimension driven
    Sage Intacct wrote the book on dimensional accounting. Dimensions allow you to quickly filter, group, and summarize your data by the attributes that matter to your business, such as location, department, project, warehouse or contract.
  • Full dashboard reporting
    Build user-specific dashboards that include reports, graphs, charts, visual indicators, custom lists, calendars, links and more.
  • Real-time data
    Build a report or dashboard once, then let Sage Intacct update it for you in real time.
  • Drill down capabilities
    Drill down from reports to the transaction level allows you to answer what made up the numbers.
  • Flexible delivery
    Publish or email scheduled or on-the-fly reports to anyone, anytime.
  • Report exports
    If you still need your financial reporting data in Excel, Sage Intacct allows you to output your reports in Excel format – HTML, PDF and CSV.

In Summary

Excel will always have a place and a purpose. However, as a powerful reporting tool, Excel falls short and may be costing your organization in time and trust. If you’d like to learn more about Sage Intacct’s reporting power, we’d love to chat!