BI Insights | 5x Technology

5 Reasons SAP Crystal Reports Creates the Clearest Financial Reports

Written by Jeffrey Yefsky | 2/28/17 3:44 PM

Without a doubt, companies today are seeking to produce better financial reports against disparate data sources—and to present the reports clearly and in a personalized format to the layers of audiences both within and outside the company walls. Furthermore, they want one tool that reliably produces sophisticated BI and financial reports that are capable of being delivered in multiple formats for ease of access.

For financial reports to speak to the varying roles it requires a reporting solution with the agility to build business logic with the comprehensive layout capability to provide a summarized view of information valued by the C-Suite, yet be capable of generating personalized dashboard reporting layouts for Directors, Managers, Accounting, and HR; the solution should also include the flexibility to summarize and generate dynamic reports for stakeholders and investors.

Not too much to ask, right?

Actually, it isn't if you choose SAP Crystal Reports as your reporting solution.

Crystal Report design capabilities, broad data connectivity and extensible formula language make it the perfect solution for building dynamic reports that require complex business logic. This article will highlight five ways that using SAP Crystal Reports will create clearer and more personalized financial reporting dashboards.

1. Direct Connectivity to Multiple Enterprise Data Sources

Whether you are using data from sources like Oracle and Sybase or using your own file system data from Outlook, with Crystal Reports you can deliver dynamic reports from virtually any data source.

  • Unite data into a single, summarized view of the information
  • Compatible data sources include Native, ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connectivity to relational, OLAP, Web services, XML, enterprise data sources, and Salesforce.com.

2. Flexible Dashboard Reporting Design and Advanced Visual Control

The flexibility to deliver custom content to any user is an important feature. People in specific functions should be able to access the information that they need. The metrics on a CEO's dashboard will look different from those monitored by the CFO and even more different from those a sales manager might use. The ability to customize the user's view of the content is more than just a simple dashboard layout. Flexibility in personalizing reports, including advanced visual control for the end user.

  • Create powerful, dynamic, richly formatted, pixel-perfect reports quickly
  • Crosstabs capabilities: Great for financial reporting; allows dimensions to be displayed on the X-axis and on the Y-axis, similar to pivot tables.
  • Create reports that will look perfectly formatted over millions of records. Its "pixel-perfect" layout and advanced charting controls make Crystal Reports a perfect choice for financial and BI reporting.
  • Turns almost any data source into interactive, actionable information.
  • Enhance report designs with powerful, integrated components – such as dynamic charts, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design data visualizations.
  • Explore results interactively with on-report sorting and filtering.

3. Crystal Reports Has Extremely High Data Volume Capability

This is a very strong tool which can handle large volumes of data. It also provides business users the best interoperability with SAP data sources as well as many other types of relational data sources.

  • Quickly render data from millions of records, and consume them in one batch.
  • Pull data from various sources to create powerful "mashups."
  • Integrate reports quickly into business processes with XML exporting.

4. Powerful, Personalized Dashboard Reports Delivery

When you have a reporting software that connects to virtually every database and data source, you can easily query data to create a deeply customized report that precisely fits your need.

  • Set automatic delivery to blast personalized reports to thousands of recipients.
  • Instant Alert Notification: Alerts based on any field, calculation or value can be emailed to users instead of demanding that users review a report just to check for critical changes.

5. BI Dashboard Reports Portability Options & Mobile Interactivity

BI dashboarding has become an integral part of the office setting. Crystal Reports offers output to a variety of formats and brings this data to your mobile devices, which completely untethers your business.

  • Whether you are using Crystal Reports with SAP BusinessObjects software, embedded in custom applications, or in a custom-built portal, reports are portable and adaptable to any data source no matter where they are executed.
  • Crystal Reports offers export formats including PDF, Excel, Word and our standard, published XML schema.
  • Designed for Web: The web offers an ideal opportunity to streamline the access to and the delivery of information from multi-dimensional data sources.
  • Mobile Interactivity: Interactive reports are available through mobile devices.

SAP Crystal Solutions to Fit Any Company

With so many built-in features beneficial to enterprise, it helps to take a deeper look at a few of the most powerful crystal solutions portfolio.

SAP Crystal Dashboard Design

Crystal Dashboard Design software will transform your business data into insightful and interactive dashboards. This enables decision makers to more easily monitor business performance, spot critical relational data, and utilize powerful "what-if" scenarios to better understand the implications of data on future performance.

With Dashboard Design you can quickly consolidate data from multiple reports and various other live data into a single dashboard, offering a more holistic view of your company.

Use the software to develop persuasive executive summaries and impactful forecast models. Within the software, access resources like ROI calculators, financial modeling, and score carding tools. This software can help any member of your team build operational, a departmental, a key performance indicator (KPI), and custom dashboards using multiple and varied data sources

SAP Crystal Reports Viewer

The Crystal Reports Viewer is hands down the best way to provide a live, interactive reporting experience. Reports Viewer allows your team unprecedented access to your company's documents. With Reports Viewer, users can interact in various ways like opening, viewing, managing, running, refreshing, printing, sharing, and exporting their Crystal Reports files.

SAP Crystal Presentation Design

What if you could transform static boring Excel sheets into beautiful compelling and meaningful presentations? This is just one of the many capabilities of Crystal Presentation Design. Present complex financial data in a way that all stakeholders can understand.

SAP Crystal Server

Considered one of the most essential tools for small and medium-sized businesses, SAP Crystal Server is actually an important tool for any enterprise whose goal is growth and scale. Because the self-service access and broad scale reporting activities alleviate some of the pressure off your already over-taxed in-house IT resources, you finally have room to grow.

Download our FREE eBook The Business Dashboard Software, Design & Reporting Guide, and get started on the path to better dashboard design, reporting and financial processes.