Pairing Angles for Deltek with Spreadsheet Server Produces Next-Level Operational Reporting

October 27, 2022

Finance teams are increasingly being asked for timely, recurring operational reports to support day-to-day decision making. Predictably, that responsibility often comes with its own set of challenges. The most common challenges your finance team probably faces are: lengthy report creation time, existing tool complexity, and the inability to drill into transactional data.

Let’s take a moment to dive into these. Whether you have a mid- to large-sized business, your teams’ data needs are complex. There is a considerable number of manual processes when it comes to operational reporting which expose your business to risk. Without an operational reporting solution that is intuitive and truly self-service, you experience delays, high skill barriers for report creation, siloed data stores, and complicated report distribution processes.

Read along below on how you can accelerate your operational reporting production and the distribution of actionable data while reducing your dependence on IT.

The obstacles blocking your best reporting

Your team likely wants more from its operational reporting tool. Only 11% of finance teams are satisfied with their current reporting tools, according to a recent report from Hanover Research.

Here are the main issues holding your team back from better reporting:

Low flexibility of native or generic tools

Native or generic tools promise the world but come with long implementation times and no pre-built content that understands your ERP. They will often easily satisfy base operational reporting needs, but when you look to extend past that level, require technical knowledge to customize. This can leave finance teams mired in long wait times for IT support to generate the analysis they need.

Over-reliance on IT

A staggering 71 percent of respondents to the aforementioned report rely on IT for help with operational reporting, and 31 percent produce all their recurring reports either completely or mostly manually. Modern IT teams are already over-taxed and will often deprioritize everything but the most urgent tasks. Ad hoc reporting requests are unlikely to make the cut and may take weeks or months to generate.

Limited access to data

Users can’t access the data they need, when they need it, and in a format that works for them. Operational data must be pulled from multiple sources across the business and static data exports quickly become out-of-date, meaning analysis is no longer current. Stakeholders within finance and other business areas lack access to timely, operational data to support day-to-day decision-making. Decision-makers need a better way to produce, share, and consume operational reports connected to updated data.

Too slow with processes and too many tools

Finance teams typically jump between multiple, unrelated, and disconnected applications to complete their workload – wasting time and duplicating efforts. Having multiple tools means having multiple interfaces to learn, multiple tools to administer, and multiple connections to manage the same set of data sources.

Gain the improvements your team needs

Project reporting can be complex and time-consuming for Deltek customers. As we have seen above, manual processes limit the ability of the finance department to execute essential tasks efficiently. There is frustration with tools and with inflexible reporting, not to mention the over-reliance on IT. So, whenever possible, finance professionals need ways to automate operational reporting, effectively removing manual processing from the equation and reducing their reliance on scarce IT resources. Angles for Deltek offers better options, including the following user gains:

• A comprehensive library of extensible, interactive business views that will rapidly meet 80 percent of your finance team’s operational reporting needs.
• Tools to configure custom views for the remaining 20% of your team’s operational reporting needs.
• Interactive reports, visualizations, and dashboards that cover common financial and operational reporting needs.

And that is only a snapshot of the benefits your finance users will enjoy with Angles for Deltek.

“Angles has been effective to providing us real-time financial and operational data that otherwise we would have to manually parse together. The dashboards are very intuitive and help to drive more efficiency for my team and for our key stakeholders.” – Karl Dingfeld, CPA, CA, MBA, Director of Finance, ACML

Why Angles for Deltek Blends Perfectly with Spreadsheet Server

Connecting Spreadsheet Server and Angles for Deltek brings insightsoftware’s ERPsmarts to your operational reporting process. With Angles, you can provide the same user-friendly, transactional-level access that your finance team loves, paired with Spreadsheet Server for GL reporting, in a form that is intuitive and accessible for the entire organization for operational reporting. Angles translates ERP complexity into intuitive reports with rich, out of the box content that’s built for your ERP and designed to meet the operational reporting needs of the wider organization.

Once you integrate Spreadsheet Server with Angles for Deltek, here is what your team gets:

• Simplified and centralized account administration

Because Angles and Spreadsheet server will both live on the insightsoftware platform, combining these solutions will give you a single place to manage your users and allocate licenses, saving you time and effort. The benefits of the platform extend beyond those administering your systems; your users will enjoy a consistent interface, onboarding experience and a central point of access to both Spreadsheet Server and Angles.

• Accessible operational reporting for the entire organization

Spreadsheet Server is the tool you need to understand your financial data, with Angles you can now provide all your stakeholders with a tool that does the same for operational data. Angles drag-and-drop editing, rich visualizations and intuitive interactivity allow business users to easily access and refresh their reports at any time so they can explore the latest data to get fast answers to their key questions. Now users can access data in the way that works for them: Finance in Excel, others through their browser.

• Low risk and short time to value

Work with the company you trust for your operational reporting – a company that intimately understands your ERP – Angles allows you to extend the same ERPsmarts you know and love from Spreadsheet Server to solve your operational reporting challenges. Give your team a head start with pre-built content packs, including interactive reports, visualizations, and dashboards purpose-built for your ERP that cover common financial and operational reporting needs. Get up and running immediately with no installation required. Combine ERP data with other sources to view the bigger picture. Differentiator against BI tools that can connect to almost any source but lack context/understanding of the data – resulting in longer time to value.

Schedule a demo for Angles for Deltek to see how it provides the user-friendly, transactional-level access that your finance team needs: