A new generation of powerful cost effective business intelligence (BI) solutions from Sage helps small, mid and large sized organisations to build significant competitive advantage, by identifying inefficient processes as well as opportunities for innovation and business growth.
By leveraging and structuring existing business data, Sage Business Intelligence (SageBI) provides real intelligence about the behaviour of your markets, customers, operations, suppliers, business performance and much more.

What is Intelligent Reporting? 
Businesses are faced with the same challenges as ever – how best to increase sales and how best to manage costs. The difference these days is that there is a demand for decisions to be made so much more quickly than before but there is often more data available to be considered as part of the decision making process.  
Sage Intelligent Reporting brings your business data into the familiar Microsoft Excel environment and then allows you to quickly analyse your company’s data from many different angles such as sales by product, by department or by sales person.
This gives you the ability to make the decisions promptly and based on facts and, because the data is now in Microsoft Excel, you can start adding your own calculations and bringing in data from other sources.
Sage Intelligent Reporting is designed for people who make business decisions. You don’t have to know how to use Sage Line 50 or be a Microsoft Excel expert, you don’t need to know your debits from your credits – you just need to ask questions of the data you already have.

Sage Intelligent Reporting will help you gain valuable insight into how your business is performing, enabling you to identify opportunities and helping you to make sure that your business is ready for the future.
Sage Intelligent Reporting is a fully supported product, offering inclusive telephone and e-mail access to jargon-free advice from Sage technicians. You will also benefit from the use of online business guides and other resources.
Benefits
Sage Intelligent Reporting:

• Is intuitive – it’s easy to learn and use
• Saves you time – no more long hours spent bringing data together
• Provides accurate business data. Errors in data caused by re-keying information and in building queries are removed
• Ensures that data is available and easily accessed, giving you the information that you need 
• Allows you to easily monitor and improve your business’s performance

Business Intelligence is a key ingredient of success today, used by forward-thinking organisations as a driver for business innovation.  Intelligence about the behaviour of your market, customers, manufacturing, suppliers, business performance and much more is analysed to maintain your competitive advantage and drive business growth.
The solution provides business process management reporting by way of powerful exception analysis, professional financial reporting and high quality performance dashboards and scorecards.
So if you are looking to leverage the valuable data held in your Sage Line 200/500 applications, then take a look at Sage Business Intelligence.

Sage Business Intelligence for Line 200/500 is the way to present management reports and analyses from your Line 500 application. It allows financial data marts to be built “out of the box” for SOP, POP and GL modules and allows others to be added through customisation by Sage partners or through your own internal skills. Once created, these data marts form the base from which powerful reporting applications can be easily created from within Excel using the Sage Business Intelligence Excel addin. These applications can then be deployed via Excel or optionally published as fully interactive applications over the web using the Sage Business Intelligence Web Server.

The main Sage Business Intelligence modules include :

Sage Business Intelligence Solution Builder

This piece of software connects to your Line 500 database to build the Sage Business Intelligence data marts or cubes without requiring any knowledge of the underlying technology. You simply tell it how you would like to analyse your business from a reporting perspective e.g by customer, supplier, product etc and all the underlying connections are made for you. Consolidation hierarchies and calculations can then be added in a few simple steps e.g rolling 3 month averages, variance period on period etc. This information is then used to seamlessly create the data cubes for the final application.

Sage Business Intelligence Data Import Manager

Once the data cubes have been created, the Data Import Manager loads the data directly from Line 500. Complete or partial updates can be easily initiated and scheduled. There are no restrictions on historical data, so comparisons can be made over 5 or more years, when trending financial data.

SageBI Report Structure Manager

Your General Ledger stores all the account codes, however from a reporting perspective you may wish to roll sets of account codes into higher levels to simplify and optimise analysis and drill down paths. You may wish to control signage of the data e.g. Revenue should be reported as +ve and control the way Actual v Budget variances are calculated according to whether the variances are related to cost or revenue. The SageBI Report Structure Manager makes such tasks trivial and the results update the data cubes easily to provide a far richer reporting experience.

Sage Business Intelligence Excel Client

The Sage Business Intelligence Excel client makes reporting and analysis of Line 500 data cubes simple yet extremely powerful. Standard Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports with Drill Down and Drill Across functionality can be created in minutes, along with exception reports such as who are my best performing or worst performing products / customers.
Trend charts can easily be added to highlight positions over a 12 month or multi year comparison. Finally, analysts can use powerful advanced features such as ad hoc slicing and dicing of the data to examine exceptions in more detail and to determine root causes of good or adverse business performance.

Sage Business Intelligence Web Server

Once reports have been created in the Sage Business Intelligence Excel client, these reports can be simply published to the Sage Business Intelligence Web Server, allowing users to access the reports (including all formatting and any calculations added in Excel) from the simplicity of a standard web browser. For truly mobile users, these reports can optionally be accessed from a Pocket Windows based SmartPhone or PDA, facilitating true analytics on the move.

SageBI Foundation Pack

The SageBI Foundation Pack comprises the Sage Business Intelligence Solution Builder, Sage Business Intelligence Data Import Manager, Sage Business Intelligence Report Structure Manager and a single Sage Business Intelligence Excel client. In effect, everything needed to create your first Sage Business Intelligence application.
 
For new Sage Line 500 5.5 customers, the Sage Business Intelligence Foundation Pack is included as part of your initial purchase. Additional Sage Business Intelligence Excel clients can then be added in user packs, along with the Sage Business Intelligence Web Server.
For existing Line 500 customers, the Sage Business Intelligence Foundation Pack with 10 Sage Business Intelligence Excel clients and the Web Server are packaged as an initial entry configuration.