Advanced Sage 200 reporting is needed when the many reports, and several means of reporting, included in Sage 200 (previously Sage 200cloud, Sage 200c and, long ago, Sage MMS) as standard aren’t sufficient.

As a reminder the means of reporting include:

• Conventional printed reports found in the reports section of most modules in Sage 200
• Excel Reporting which creates what are actual Microsoft Excel “pivot tables” with filtering done by “slicers”
• Workspaces which while typically used as on screen lists can be filtered and either printed or exported to Excel
• Business Intelligence

What is advanced Sage 200 reporting

The broadest definition of advanced Sage 200 reporting is that it is any report not produced by Sage, whether a tweak to a standard Sage 200 printed report, a cross group companies report delivered using Microsoft Power BI to your mobile, or anything in between.

When appropriate we use (and offer training in how to use) the Sage supplied tools for reporting.  Our core understanding of advanced Sage 200 reporting, though, is doing things that either are much quicker to do using non Sage tools or simply aren’t possible to Sage supplied tools.  For this reason we most commonly extract data directly from the databases that hold Sage 200 data, and report using Microsoft Excel or other Microsoft software such as Power BI.

Excel reporting packs

Our most common advanced Sage 200 reporting task is building Excel reporting packs.  The solution isn’t just based on an understanding of Sage 200 and Microsoft Excel, but also an understanding of accounting principles.  The report packs:

• Refresh directly and quickly from Sage data – no more manual keying of data
• Present data exactly how you want it, for example columns for cost centres
• Can be based on period balances or individual transactions – period balances are fast, individual transactions allow drill down
• Report on single companies, or can report across group – easy group reporting

Other advanced Sage 200 reports

The sky is the limit, but examples of advanced reports include:

• Cross group cash position, currency exposure or aged debtors
• Aged debtors sorted and filtered by some or all of: outstanding balance; date of last receipt; currency; credit controller
• Activity / performance reports such as: ratio of invoices to credit notes by month; transaction counts by type of transaction by month; order lines picked by day, week or month
• Margin reports by year and month, easily adjustable to show by: product group; by product; by customer; by region and many others

Our approach

We marry accounting and business understanding with Sage 200, Excel and database skills and:

• Collect and analyse your requirements so that we understand what you need to achieve in business terms
• Relate it to how you collect and process data in Sage 200 – making adjustments to processes if necessary
• Consider who will use the report and how – will they need to do further analysis; is detail or summary information preferred etc
• Choose the right tool for creating and delivering the report
• Draft the report
• Verify the report – wherever possible using reconciliations verifiable by the client