CLA’s Sage Intacct Spark #6: New Interactive Custom Report Writer
With Release 4 having just made its debut, there were quite a few exciting announcements. From a new month-end dynamic allocations tool and the official release of the Interactive Report Writer to slight (but welcome) changes to the new UI . Missed the release notes? Catch them here.
In this week’s post I’ll share a sneak peak of my favorite features of the new Interactive Custom Report Writer.
Feature #1: Advanced Formulas
The custom report writer currently has the ability to create formulas. However, if you’ve tried to use it, you’re aware of the significant limitations. (I certainly thought so when I wrote up step 3 of this blog post on the Custom Report Wizard). With the new Interactive Custom Report Writer, formulas are truly a highlight.
A sample of an If/Then formula in the new report writer:
This formula looks at the item name, and if it’s name is “Bronze Monthly Plan”, it sets the customer’s monthly plan limit to 250. If it’s not the Bronze plan, it sets it to 125. I could then compile this with usage data from another system (if not tracked statistically already in Intacct) and send to my sales team to work with clients to find an appropriately sized plan.
If your Customer’s usage is tracked statistically or through Contracts, you could even write a formula to suggest plans based on usage using formulas. A report writer that helps you grow your business.
More information on writing formulas here!
Feature #2: Live Dynamic Report Preview
Do you hate having to guess which fields contain the data you’re looking for with the custom report writer currently? If you’re new to the system, you likely fall into the category of guess and check which field contains the data you need. If you’ve ever used SalesForce’s report writer you, like me, may have wished Intacct had something similar. (No over-exaggeration here: you can even read the idea I submitted on the community 3 years ago).
The live dynamic report preview now allows you to double click or drag and drop fields to include in a live preview of your report with your actual data.
A sample of the dynamic preview:
That means you are editing and immediately seeing the results. In my report, once I previewed the data I noticed that it was including One Time Fees and Ice Cream Flavors (it is a demo company after all), which I then right clicked to exclude them from my report since I was only interested in reporting on specific items for my customer renewals.
I could probably end the blog here, but let’s continue because it gets even better.
Feature #3: Pivot Tables
You can take your reports a step further with Pivot Tables. Previously, I may have just left my report as is, with a giant list of renewals. Now, you can create a pivot table based on Sales Rep for example and send a separate version of this report to each rep filtering on their Employee ID. If you’re worried this might add complexity to the build process, as I was, I was gladly proven wrong. Building Pivot Tables is also a drag and drop process with a dynamic preview.
Preview of the Table:
Bonus Feature: Conditional Formatting
Just like with financial reports, you can now apply conditional highlighting to interactive reports (more on financial report visual indicator how to’s here). Custom reports, by nature, are pretty data-heavy. Make it easier (and arguably more addicting) for users by applying conditional highlights to draw their eye to key information.
In my report example, I might want to highlight if a customer is paying less than $100/month for their plan.
Watch a demo of the new Interactive Custom Report Writer here.
What’s Next?
We’re officially more than half-way through the CLA Sage Intacct Spark Series! Subscribe (top right of the page) to receive the last 5 right to your inbox. Interested in more Intacct help? Perhaps a review of the new release features and how you might be able to take advantage of them? Contact us!
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with nine years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.