We've been looking at F9 - a great reporting tool used with Excel and Financial Edge. We've had a couple of demos and we're pretty much sold. As usual, it costs - what doesn't?
The application is basically an add-on to Excel. The cool thing - you don't use an FE license when you access reports from Excel. The uncool thing - it's licensed per desktop user.
Here's how it works. You basically set up your financial reports in Excel. You reference data in FE. You can easily set up a report using the Wizard. Changing the report is as easy as changing a date in a field or filtering on a set of date - say fund, account, etc.
Another really cool thing- F9 understand certain terminology. If you have a worksheet set up with all the months of the year except December including rows of data, you can just type December in the column heading and copy the data to that column from your November column. All fields are updated with December data when you press F9. You can use terminoly like month name, period name, budget, etc. Really helpful.
How do I plan to use this tool (hoping I get it that is) - all my financial statements for the year will be set up once and my exec director and finance director will just push F9 to see any changes. Yes, that means if I post in a journal entry in FE and they hit f9 in their Excel report, they will instantly get the latest figures. That is just a start - we plan to do a lot more analysis using F9.
I'm really excited about this product and wanted to share the excitement with you. If we get it, I'll post how it goes. I'm attempting the install and training myself using the User Guide. Gotta cut costs if we can.
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