Data & Business Intelligence
Data & Business Intelligence · Capability

Sage Intelligence & Crystal Reports

The reporting tools your Sage licence already speaks — Sage Intelligence for Excel-native financial packs, Crystal Reports for the operational documents and statements a business runs on.

Sage Intelligence Reporting is built around Excel: it pulls Sage financials into workbooks with layouts, formulas, and pivot-ready structures already in place, so consolidations, multi-module analysis, and the kind of ad hoc slicing finance teams do in Excel anyway become fast rather than a rebuild-from-scratch exercise every month end. It's the natural home for management packs and board reporting where the output has to live in Excel or a scheduled email.

Crystal Reports covers different ground: precisely laid-out, printable documents — statements, remittances, delivery notes, formal financial statements — where field placement, page breaks, and exact formatting matter more than interactivity. Both tools already sit inside your Sage licence, so extending what you get from Sage Intelligence and Crystal Reports is usually cheaper and faster than introducing a separate BI product for jobs these two already do well.

The actual products

Sage Intelligence Reporting

Excel-native financial packs and consolidations — the tool for management accounts and board reporting.

Crystal Reports

Precisely laid-out printable documents — statements, remittances, delivery notes — where formatting matters more than interactivity.

Part of Data & Business Intelligence

Your systems already hold the answers — they are just trapped in transactions. We build Power BI reporting layers on top of your ERP, payroll and operational data: dashboards leadership actually opens, exceptions that surface themselves, and one agreed version of every number.

Also part of Data & Business Intelligence
Questions we hear about Data & Business Intelligence
How much does Power BI cost?

Licensing is tiered — free for personal use, per-user Pro for shared reporting (the mid-market default), Premium and capacity options for scale — with current prices set by Microsoft. Two honest cost notes: report viewers need licences too, which is the line item most first budgets miss, and the real project cost is data modelling and clean-up, not licences. We quote the whole picture.

We already use Excel — why do we need Power BI?

You'll know the symptoms: the same report rebuilt by hand every month, three conflicting copies of "the numbers", files that crash when they grow. It isn't either/or — Excel stays brilliant for ad-hoc analysis. Power BI takes over the repeated, shared, multi-source reporting, connected live to the ERP so the numbers refresh themselves and everyone reads the same version.

How long does it take to build a dashboard?

A well-scoped first dashboard on reasonable data takes two to three weeks; a structured departmental rollout with modelling, testing and training runs about a quarter. The honest variable is your data quality — which is why we start with discovery, then deliver the first dashboard fast and iterate.

Does our data need to be clean before we start?

Reasonably, yes — a dashboard on dirty data creates confident wrong decisions, which is worse than no dashboard. Our discovery phase assesses data quality first; most ERP data is workable with transformation, but issues like duplicate customers or inconsistent item codes get fixed at the source, and every financial dashboard is reconciled against your trial balance before anyone trusts it.

Platforms: Power BI · Sage Intelligence · Crystal Reports · ZAP BI · Nectari · SQL Server