Chuck's Reporting Corner December 2008

Intuit's new Business Analysis tool

On November 19th, QuickBooks Enterprise released a suite of online applications, one of which is a tool called Business Analysis ES.

This is a web based application powered by Web Intelligence tools licensed from Business Objects, the leader in Business Intelligence and now, an SAP company. You can use these tools via an Internet Explorer or Foxfire browser, with confidence about the security and anonymity of this data.

Business Analysis (BA) allows users to slice, dice, graph, analyze, create what-if scenarios, and can be used by both novices and power users alike. Unlike the SDK, or QODBC driver which require you to have extensive knowledge of QuickBooks, data structure, and database relationships, BA only requires you to have a better than average knowledge of QuickBooks to reap some benefits for you and your clients.

I am proud to discuss this offering with you, as I was intimately involved in this project for the past year. I consulted with Intuit as a data analyst, database engineer, schema architect and Business Objects specialist to transform the raw QuickBooks data into usable and manageable pieces for their engineering and asset design teams; and I further assisted in the organization and presentation of the semantic data levels upon which the Business Objects tools are used.

HOW IT WORKS

From within QuickBooks (Enterprise ONLY), you will go to "Online Solutions" and choose "Business Analysis ES". After receiving credentials via a phone call to Enterprise Support, you will upload your QuickBooks data into a secure web hosting data center hosted by Intuit. Depending upon the speed of your connection and the size of your file, it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours to complete the upload process. ( I have heard several colleagues tell me that a 300Meg file takes about 2 hours to load on a normal DSL connection).

The data is seamlessly updated automatically every 15 minutes, and takes a very short time, since only changes are synchronized into the web hosting data centers.

For the more technical audience: The data "in the cloud" then gets seamlessly transformed into a structure that is optimized for speed, and an understandable layout. The Business Objects tools sit on top of this clean data structure, and those tools are what you use to drag and drop columns of data within a browser to get your final results.

Here is an diagram of the process:

Using your browser, you will login, and have four offerings to choose from:

1. Default Price Levels by Customer
2. Item Sales Summary by Month
3. Item Sales Summary by Sales Rep
4. Custom Sales Report Builder

Choosing the Item Sales Summary by Sales Rep report, for instance, will bring you to this entry page:

Then, on the upper right hand side click on this link: to take you to a slightly different view, where you get to play with the data. e.g. drag and drop fields into the main report - or remove existing columns from the report by dragging them off of the canvass.

Above the canvas, there is a formatting/formula toolbar that gives you Excel like formatting capability, and allows you to quickly sum, group, or sort your report. You can even add your own filters for any column!

For the real technical/power user there is an incredible formula creating capability that gives you the muscle to concatenate or parse fields, create complicated mathematical models, or even create data summaries based upon filtered elements - all within the same report. This is much stronger than functions you find in Excel.

Please don't let this screen scare any of you - as it ONLY for those accountant geeks like myself who are called upon to create some complicated analysis project for a client whose QB file is unique to that industry or operation. It is NOT necessary for you to use, to get wonderful results for your clients.

Create multiple reports and graphs side by side on the same canvas.

Want to view your data in pictures? Options, options, options. Even create crosstabs by simply dragging the crosstab element on your canvas.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH ALL OF THESE TOOLS?

There are over 100 QuickBooks "objects" available to use in any of the 4 report offerings. How about sales, by rep, by customer type? Remember that QuickBooks summary report where you wanted the customer address to show but couldn't? BA makes that easy.

How about analyzing sales rep sales by gross profit margin? Or create a list of the top 20 selling items? Create sales graphs based on quantity - by quarter, by month, by year; or even day. The list is endless.

WHAT DATA IS AVAILABLE?

This first release is based upon sales related tables:

• Invoice
• Credit Memo
• Sales Receipts
• Statement Charges

We also have additional information from dimension tables (what we might know as "lists" in QuickBooks).

• Customer
• Class
• Item

This gives us the ability to add information to transactions and summaries that we might not get in QuickBooks.

REPORTING VS ANALYTICS

The great thing about this tool, is that you can create summary dashboards for the money makers e.g. business owners and sales managers; yet create detailed management and analysis reports for money managers .e.g. bookkeepers, operations personnel.

SUMMARY

There is a wealth of power in these new BA tools, and one article cannot do justice to unleashing it; but hopefully you get a picture of this unique foray into the future of computing by Intuit's Mid Market Group. Keep tuned to the Sleeter Group for announcements on webinars, and membership discounts on ACCOUNTiGRATE advanced BA training.

Please send questions to askchuck@sleeter.com if you want to see more on this tool in future newsletters.

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