Reports & Dashboards in Sage Intacct for Entertainment

Building An “A-List” Corporate Accounting & Finance Team

This blog post is a continuation in our series designed to help growing entertainment companies recognize and overcome some of the most common challenges in corporate accounting and finance. For related topics, click on the links below:

• Building block #1: Data dimensions
• Building block #2: Multi-entity accounting
• Building block #3: Account groups
• Building block #4: Reports and Dashboards

Improve Visibility into All Aspects of Your Operations with Sage Intacct Reports & Dashboards

Challenge:

As discussed in prior blogs, growing entertainment companies face significant challenges to produce real-time reports and analysis. Legacy solutions (e.g., Microsoft Great Plains) or entry-level applications (e.g., QuickBooks) simply can’t provide the real-time analysis they need. As a result, most end up doing the bulk of their reporting in Excel. And it doesn’t take Dr. Spock to know that forcing well-compensated and creative accounting professionals to manually create the bulk of their various reports in Excel doesn’t make a lot of sense. Definitely not a recipe for living long and prospering.

For others, they determine that some sort of data warehouse or sophisticated business intelligence tool is going to be required to give them the reports or analysis they need. While we’re all for those tools when required, they require a lot of effort to implement and maintain.

Solution:

With Sage Intacct’s data dimensions, multi-entity architecture, and account groups, an organization has all of the building blocks for success. Sage Intacct combines these building block with a report writer that is designed for the accounting team to actually use! And then our clients take the reports that they’ve designed and create dashboards to provide all company personnel with the data they need at their fingertips. The results have been transformative.
Just as a plot is a sequence of events that tell a story, Sage Intacct’s financial reporting and dashboards tells the story of a company in real time.

Real-World Success

Skydance Media migrated from their legacy accounting solution to Sage Intacct. “Because we no longer have to manually build reports in Excel, I’d say the accounting department is easily saving 40 reporting hours per month. Plus, we can slice and dice the data any way we want and it happens in real-time so there’s no delay in getting reports to management.” (Anne Price, Skydance Media - SVP Controller)

Benefits:

• Secure, anytime, web-based access from any device, which frees executives and others to access key data from home and on the road
• Reporting tools that are easy to use, customize, and modify
• Dashboards with dynamic charts and graphs to visualize critical information and drill down to underlying transaction details
• Combine financial and non-financial data (headcounts, square footage, downloads, number of screens, etc.)
• Filter data based on user permissions to maintain internal controls and meet the needs of individual users or roles.