CLA’s Sage Intacct Spark #5: Report Groups

• November 15, 2018
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Imagine its 5pm on the day before Thanksgiving. You’ve closed out of Intacct and you’re about to leave when that little calendar reminder pops up notifying you to send the department managers their monthly reports. (If you were the guy in this blog’s photo you would have fallen off your chair). You really wish you could leave early to beat traffic, but you also need to get these reports out on time. (Especially to Betty who seems to be one of the few that always responds with questions or a “thank you!”. Recipients ignoring your reports sound familiar? Check out this blog post on how to make sure your reports grab attention with visual indicators.)

The Example:

All five department managers receive the same two types of reports:

1. GL Detail filtered for the manager’s department
2. Income Statement also filtered for the manager’s department

By establishing a report group, you can run both reports at once, instead of running each report individually.

The result: one Excel spreadsheet with a sheet for each of the two reports.

You can then run the five groups (one for each manager), as apposed to running ten separate reports. Five sounds a lot better than ten, doesn’t it? It does, but wait until the end of this post when I share a link to take this down to zero!

(Note: Why 5 separate groups if it’s the same reports? You can’t yet select a department filter at the time of running report groups, so the individual reports establish the department filter for you. A bit more setup, but saving you time long-term.)

(Note #2: We’re not limited to Excel format only here. You can also have a report group generate in PDF, CSV, or HTML).

Let’s build your report groups!

Step 1: Setup the Reports

First, build the reports you need for your groups.

In my example, I would:

1. Memorize a version of the gl detail for each department.
2. Create a version of the Income Statement (or Statement of Activities) filtered for each department.

Helpful Tip! For standard module reports (for example vendor aging or gl detail) you’ll need to memorize the report in order to include it in the group (more on memorizing from Intacct’s in-product help here).

Step 2: Navigate to Report Group Setup

Go To: Reports Module > Setup Tab > + Report Groups (under More)

Step 3: Setting up the Report Group

Give your report group a name and choose the members.

Step 4: Run Your Report Groups

Go To: Reports Module > Setup Tab > Report Groups (under More)

Click Run next to each report group.

Step 5: Download the Reports

In the list of Report Groups, click the View Report link to download the reports from Intacct.

What’s Next?

Did you know you can create cover letters for your report groups? Well now you do, and here’s the in-product help again to show you how! You can also schedule these report groups to run and deliver automatically via email without you doing anything besides the initial setup. Can it get any more efficient?

Want to make sure you receive the next 6 CLA Sage Intacct Sparks via email? Who wouldn’t when they get you out the door and onto your Thanksgiving weekend quicker? Questions about Intacct report creation? Report groups? Anything else? Contact us here!

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