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Pastel Business Intelligence Module

The Pastel Business Intelligence Centre module is a flexible Excel-based financial reporting tool designed for small, medium and large enterprises.

What is Pastel Business Intelligence Centre?
You have already achieved efficient processing with Pastel, and now your focus is on extracting valuable customised information, at the click of the button? If you wish to utilise the power within Excel to present, share and analyse your Pastel information then your tool is the Pastel Business Intelligence Centre.

Pastel goes beyond accounting to provide you with business intelligent reporting for enhanced decision-making.

Business Intelligence Centre – Standard
Provides end users with ready-boxed Intelligent Excel reporting on their Pastel data. In addition the user can use this base of reports to create new reports or even write their own reports in Excel.

Business Intelligence Centre – Advanced
Provides a skilled IT user with a powerful and cost effective report writing solution capable of delivering Excel reports from any ODBC compliant data source.

Pastel’s Business Intelligence Centre allows you to analyse any aspect of your business, including financial, sales, inventory and purchasing reporting, as long as the information is stored in an accessible database. It dynamically links to Microsoft Excel where your information can be viewed and manipulated to give you greater insight into your business. You can either utilise many of the Business Intelligence Centre’s standard reports or have customised reports written, according to your specific requirements.

Some of the standard reports include:

• Dashboard Analysis
• Financial Ratio Calculator
• Inventory Master Report
• Ledger Transaction Details Report
• Management Pack
• Various options with regard to Income Statement and Balance Sheet comparison
• Purchase Master Report
• Sales Master

Working with the Business Intelligence Centre
The Business Intelligence Centre lets you utilise the power of Microsoft Excel for reporting purposes.
Why Excel?
Microsoft Excel is the standard data manipulation and reporting tool for today's managers. As an Excel user, you already use Excel to analyse data, make projections, simulate situations, generate graphs, and so on. Excel is a specialist tool built to let you manipulate, slice and dice your data, and it does it superbly. The central issue is getting data into Excel so that you can manipulate it in the ways you want. That data is sitting in your accounting system. As your operators enter accounting data, and generate the day-to-day reports and analyses that you require, they are also generating the base data that you need for management analysis. This type of analysis moves beyond the strictly accounting realm into the realm of advanced management, reporting, and planning. Business Intelligence Centre does two main things for you:

It creates base data in Excel right out of your accounting system that is as accurate and as up to date as possible.

It provides you with useful reports and analyses as an optional starting point. By extracting the data into a worksheet, Business Intelligence Centre lets you work with the data outside of the accounting system, where you can manipulate it at your leisure. To do this, Business Intelligence Centre makes extensive use of workbooks. This allows you to:

Separate data from reports

Generate multiple reports in a single worksheet This makes your management workflow efficient and easy to control. Once the data is in an Excel worksheet, you can create new reports, analyses, and graphs yourself, or you can use the tools supplied with Business Intelligence Centre. You can use these tools as is, or you can modify them to suit your requirements. One of the tools, for example, is a set of management accounts that will produce professional looking income statements and balance sheets for various period ranges.

Extracting Data
Business Intelligence Centre has various tools for extracting the data you require from your accounting database. You can use the system in a relatively automated fashion, or, if you have the expertise, you can source data from multiple accounting databases or any third party ODBC-compliant data. Business Intelligence Centre makes use of the following objects to extract all and only the data you require:

A Data Connection holds the relevant connection information to connect to a supported ODBC or OLEDB compliant Data Source. You use this Data Connection object for all connections to this Data Source. An automatic connection system links to your accounting database system. A single Data Connection typically represents a set of company data. You can create as many connections as you require.

A Data Container is set of Data the System Administrator makes available. It gives you access to the data using the Report Manager. The source of this data can be a database table, a view, a stored procedure, or a join based on two or more tables/views. You use the latter, for example, to access invoice headers and their associated lines. Typical data containers could be the set of general ledger transactions for the year, customers over their credit limit, and so on. You can create as many Data Containers as you require.

A Data Expression is usually a field in a Data Container chosen by the System Administrator to be available through the Report Manager. For example, the Administrator chooses which fields on a customer master file are available. A Data Expression can also be a SQL Expression or an Excel formula. You can create as many Data Expressions as you require. Once all the containers and expressions are set up (if you do not use the standard ones), you create or edit a report to move the data. Most of the time, all you need to do is to choose the fields from the various database tables in the system. Besides choosing which fields, you can include powerful filters to ensure that you only have the data you require. You can also specify a sort order for the data you are generating. You access Business Intelligence Centre via the View...Business Intelligence Centre menu option. You choose the option you require from the sub menus.