Hello colleagues,
I have several clients still using the discontinued and deprecated Spreadsheet Analyst with Budget Accelerator (formerly Insight Reporting) from Insight Software (previously Global Software, Inc.) and I'm looking for a suitable replacement (which so far I've failed to do). I looked at Insight Software's replacement for Spreadsheet Analyst called Spreadsheet Server but it doesn't have a solid universal filter built for Sage 300 (Accpac) which Analyst did, would require one to be developed by Insight for EACH site and doesn't seem to have the same powerful in-memory engine my clients have come to rely on for gigabytes of reporting data - especially clients who need a seperate Data Warehouse because reporting on the live Sage 300 company database would kill the system (the Data Warehouse is updated each night and reporting is done on the warehouse not the live data). Data Warehousing is only at sites with larger 10+GB databases.
On the budget side, these clients have become used to creating custom budgets in Spreadsheet Analyst outside of Sage 300 and being able to one-click write back to update those budgets when needed. So I guess what I'm looking for is:
- A powerful in-memory Excel reporting engine that doesn't just dump all the data into an Excel sheet and re-arrange it with Pivot Tables (like Sage Intelligence). I need something that can filter and sort the data BEFORE it arrives in Excel and can handle gigabytes of reporting data on the fly.
- A budget tool that allows editing and writing budgets back to Sage 300 or better still a separate budgeting engine with one-click write-backs that has more features than Sage 300's budgets.
- Preferred but not essential: A Data Warehouse option to report off a separate reporting database instead of the live ERP database. If this isn't an option reports can just be run overnight.
Open to any recommendations. I want something that can natively report on Sage 300 data without building a whole custom connector/filter but doesn't have to be a Sage 300 module - can be an entirely separate software suite.
Cheers...Tim
