Within Sage Accounts there are several powerful tools for reporting and data interrogation.
The program itself comes with many reports for each module including detailed nominal activity, profit and loss and balance sheets, so looking at the standard reports should be your first port of call.
Sage Accounts also comes with a report design program as standard. This can be used to customise existing report templates.
This also enables you to edit invoice and statement layouts, add logos, boxes or additional data as required.
Reports can also be created from scratch, so you have a specific new report within the program. These can be customised, allowing grouping, filtering and totalling.
Batch reporting gives the facility to run a set of reports all together. Perhaps you always run the same set of reports at month end, these can be grouped and criteria specified for each one from one screen.
There is the facility to create favourites, similar to those you would find in an internet browser, so you can quickly find the report you need.
However, you may wish to work outside of Sage, and transfer data to a Microsoft product.
There are several ways of transferring data from Sage Accounts to a Microsoft program, for example Excel. If you are in a “grid” screen then an option exists to simply send the data exactly as it to Excel.
This does not allow any criteria change, so may require further manipulation in the spreadsheet.
Once enabled you will also find a new tab in Excel for Sage. This allows you to connect to your company data and gives access to data fields to build up your own spreadsheet, using Excel functionality.
Gail Kristiansen is a book keeping manager for Rennie Welch. For advice contact gail.kristiansen@renniewelch.co.uk or 01573 224931.