Your bookkeeper and accountant keep track of your business’s financial finances. But, are you really making the best use of that information? The old saying is that you cannot see the forest for the trees. All too often the reports you receive are presented as lots and lots of columns of numbers with profit or loss figures at the bottom. In this day and age you can do better. The financial success of your business depends on you getting clear, concise, and actionable reports. Here at Exigo Business Solutions we have a couple of suggestions for how to make that happen. It starts with good, solid bookkeeping and then moves on to business intelligence.
At Exigo, we are QuickBooks Advanced Certified ProAdvisors. QuickBooks is a bookkeeping and accounting software program especially tailored for small and medium-sized businesses. Actionable reports for your business start with complete and accurate data and our choice for our small business clients is QuickBooks.
This is not a new idea. Smart business owners have been making smart decisions based on accurate and insightful analysis of their finances for a long time. But, in this electronic and computer-driven era, the task is easier and the business results can be better. Business intelligence is the term used for using computer technology to analyze data and derive actionable information. The point is to make the most informed business decisions possible to help grow your business.
Your small business bookkeeping information is in QuickBooks. You want a tool that easily takes the information you want and put it in clear, actionable reports. Of the various business intelligence tools, Clearify QQube is the best fit for this purpose.
Think of QQube as the facilitator that connects your QuickBooks data to the reporting tool of your choice.
• Excel
• Excel PowerPivot
• Access
• Microsoft Power BI
• SAP Crystal Report
• Tableau Desktop
QQube makes the job of pulling out data and creating reports faster and easier. The end result is clearer insight into job costing, cash flow management, budgeting, inventory management, acquisition costs, or customer buying profiles. Once the data is in your QuickBooks, QQube helps you efficiently get that data out and into reports that you can easily understand. Then you can use these reports to streamline and improve the profitability of your business.
QQube allows you to “drag and drop” data from QuickBooks into Excel. It simply uses an add-in that is free with QQube and gets installed into Excel. This tool handles the otherwise complex tasks of working with relationships and raw table. This Add-In is in fact an MSQuery front end that allows you to use the data queries that underlie the information.
Using QQube you can take information from QuickBooks and display it in PowerPivot. This Excel tool is really an SQL server within the spreadsheet. Using PowerPivot for your reports lets you filter information in columns (Measures), add millions of rows of data, and import other data sources as well.
Microsoft’s Power BI is a strong business intelligence tool. QQube lets you import data from QuickBooks into this tool for insightful and compelling reports. This works seamlessly as the “shells” or underlying programming structures are already set up. You only need to import the data from QuickBooks and create the report.
If you are familiar with Access and comfortable generating reports, you will find QQube useful. You can easily transfer data to linked tables making this a virtually one step process.
SAP Crystal Reports
QQube lets you import data from QuickBooks into Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports have been around for three decades and remain the most popular report writer. This is because of the pin point formatting, impressive graphics, and visualization elements. You can get unlimited calculation options and formatting with this tool as well as special grouping options. The QQube data set in this case helps create multi-level structure for items such as account and customer. You can use this report tool to bring in several different data sources and you do not need to manually write SQL statements.
If you have the skill sets needed to create SQL relationships for complicated reports, you may be working in SQL server. Then, you can import your data directly from QuickBooks into this tool. QQube connects as a “Linked Server” by way of the SQLAnywhere OLE DB Provider. Access permissions are granted for views with "QQubeUser" or "QQFinancials" as a prefix. Obvisously, this is a little bit more complex.
Tableau
If you need really “high end” complicated analytics for your business intelligence reports, Tableau is generally considered the most powerful. Import your data from QuickBooks using QQube and you will not need to do any configuration. The “shells” will have hierarchies already set up for items, classes, and accounts.
You can also import data from QuickBooks into QQube and use its analysis tools to generate reports. QQube has 36 pre-configured analytic areas and more than 7,000 available fields. Each area is set up by standard data handling practices such a one “fact” table and multiple “dimension” tables. If you do not want to deal with reverse engineering, connection strings, tables, or relationships, this is the tool for you. However, advanced users can still use such tools as desired.
If you would like any help or more information regarding QQube reports, please schedule a free consultation with Exigo Business Solutions and ensure that you are using the right tools to help you grow your business.
