Sage Pastel brings enterprise facilities to the SME

With the launch of Sage Pastel’s 2005 range of accounting applications aimed at the SME market, the leading accounting software provider has made good on its promise to deliver a technology that goes way beyond accounting.

“Customers are accustomed to Sage Pastel providing them with accounting solutions targeted specifically at the needs of SMEs, but often we find that businesses don’t truly maximse their accounting data beyond the usual trial balance, income statement, age analysis reports and so on,” says Jeff Lewis , Director of Sage Pastel. “In the Sage Pastel 2005 range we have provided users with the means to handle their accounts in the most efficient manner possible, as well as additional functionality in the Business Intelligence Centre to slice and dice their financial data without a degree in business analytics.

“In the past, only large companies could afford the business intelligence (BI) software and skills to effectively analyse their data. Smaller companies were left to sort out their own information needs while vendors concentrated on serving the enterprise market. Sage Pastel 2005’s Business Intelligence Centre changes all that.”

Using an application most users are familiar with, Microsoft Excel, Sage Pastel has made the add-on Business Intelligence Centre module available to users of Sage Pastel Partner 2005 and Sage Pastel Evolution. Instead of having to manipulate accounting reports by cutting and pasting, or importing data into costly third party applications, financial information can be viewed directly in Excel.

This functionality allows users to examine their data from any angle and drill down to any specific information they choose without needing any technical skills.

Some of the standard BI reports users can call up include:

• Management Pack: Income Statements, Balance Sheets, etc.
• Sales Information: The ability to manipulate your sales data to highlight patterns and trends
• Inventory: Top ten sales items amongst many other reports
• Graphical analysis of sales and financial data

The Business Intelligence Centre module does not however only allow customers to use Excel as an information analysis tool; it offers complete integration between Sage Pastel and Excel. This makes it easy for users to write automated Excel reports and analyse their live accounting data. In addition, it also allows users to save the steps they take in selecting the data for their reports as well as the final format they choose.

The benefits users of the Business Intelligence Centre will experience include:

• Enhanced business information: up-to-date, advanced and professional looking reports in the format you want.
• Man days of time savings every month: with a click of a button, it’s quick and easy.
• Monthly financials with drill down to ledger detail: the monthly management pack can be automated with drill down to transaction level.
• Business Intelligence Centre Online Community: Pastel Cover customers who purchase this add-on module can download a growing collection of Standard Report templates.
• End user empowerment: reduce your dependency on IT personnel to deliver on the company’s reporting requirements. Simply enhance the Excel skills already in place.

“Sage Pastel, with its in-depth knowledge of its customers was well positioned to deliver a product designed specifically for use in the SME market,” adds Lewis. “It took a lot of research to develop a product that could provide such in-depth intelligence without a complex user interface, but providing the benefits of BI to the SME market was a task Sage Pastel was determined to do right and to do BI first.”

Sage Pastel is the leading supplier of accounting and business management applications and products are currently sold in more than 50 countries. The software is available in 6 different languages including Dutch, English, Danish, German, Icelandic and Portuguese.