Replace Excel reporting
For a question asked once, a spreadsheet is the fastest tool in the house. For a report that comes back on a schedule it is the wrong place: the same pasting, the same references that rot, the same five copies in five mailboxes. That part moves. The rest stays with you.
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The failure points
Pull four exports, paste them under one another, fix the column that came out as text again. The work is identical every period, it can only be done after the sources are closed, and it is never finished early.
Someone inserts a row, renames a tab, moves the workbook into a different folder. The formula keeps returning a value – just not the one it used to. Nothing on screen says so.
Sent on Tuesday, corrected on Wednesday, forwarded on Thursday with a note in the covering mail. Which file the meeting should open is a question no filename has ever answered.
A cell holds a figure everyone repeats. Which source it came from, which rows were filtered out and on which day it was pulled is known to one colleague – and only until they take a week off.
How the move goes
Pick the single recurring report that costs the most hands, and write down what it has to answer. A list of twenty reports stalls; one report that runs by itself convinces the people who own the other nineteen.
Databases, cloud services and files are read where they already are – 140+ connectors, no export step in between. Excel and CSV are connectors too, so a sheet somebody maintains by hand can stay a source. Where a system is not on the list, the honest routes are a database view, an ODBC connection or a scheduled export the report picks up.
The logic that grew across fifteen formulas becomes a handful of calculated fields in the model, defined once and used everywhere. That work has a page of its own: data preparation.
The report becomes an address people open, built the way a dashboard is built, with a refresh on a schedule. Whoever wants it in their inbox gets it on a schedule; whoever wants a file exports one. Nobody forwards a version any more.
What finance asks first
No, and you should not. Excel is unbeaten for the question that comes up once and for the last mile – the working copy, the quick what-if, the sheet you hand to an auditor. What moves is the recurring assembly around it. And because Excel is a connector here, a spreadsheet your team maintains deliberately can remain a data source.
Then we say so rather than promise a connector. Three routes work today: a view on the database behind that system, an ODBC connection, or an export the system writes on a schedule and smartlife BI reads as a file. All three end the copying by hand, which is the part that hurts.
Usually the person who wrote them, and faster than they expect – a calculated field is defined in the interface, not in code. Most grown formulas turn out to be three real rules plus a decade of exceptions that no longer apply.
They get one. The report exports, and a scheduled mail can carry it. The difference is where it comes from: one export out of the current report instead of a copy that starts drifting the moment it is sent.
Send us the report you rebuild most often. We connect one of its sources with you and you see the first version that updates itself.