Reporting Toolset

Reporting Toolset 

• Enquiry Screens
• Configurable Reports
• Report Writer
• SQL Export
• Ad-Hoc Reporting
• Real Time Trading Data
• Budgets and Forecasts

Abel offers a rich toolkit of specialized reporting tools coupled with several handy reporting features throughout, so you can find the information you need quickly and easily.

Enquiry Screens

We aim to meet many of your regular day to day reporting requirements with real time enquiry screens that give you the information you need at a glance and also allow you to drill down to the lowest level of data. With Abel, you can either run a report or use our enquiry screens to find out the state of your business, or to investigate the unexpected.

Enquiry screens span all of Abel’s functionality including :

• Financials and Account Reconciliation
• Debtors and Creditors
• Trade Profitability
• Inventory Levels, Reordering
• Manufacturing Scheduling and Loading
• MRP Requirements
• CRM

We also offer standard dashboards capable of interfacing to the Microsoft Charts API. Your Abel installer can configure Abel’s dashboards to your requirements.

Configurable Reports

Businesses today face complicated financial reporting and consolidation requirements. With Abel, you receive over 500 standard reports covering all of Abel’s functionality that can be used ‘out of the box’ or configured to suit your needs.

Both standard reports and custom reports developed with the Abel Report Writer are fully integrated into Abel and their placement is fully configurable to suit your business processes. The Report Favorites feature enables you to save your favorite reports and also save the filters that you normally use to run them. This makes it quick and easy to find and run the reports you use most often. Report Favorites can be for one user, shared by a group of users or made public to all users.

Abel’s reports can be:

• Grouped under configurable menu items
• Attached to relevant screens
• Saved into your Abel Report Favorites and made available to selected users
• Have security settings applied
• Previewed before printing
• Output to printers or PDF documents or as delimited text files
• Output in xlsx format for Microsoft® Excel®
• Grouped for output as a multi tabbed Excel workbook
• Sent as an email attachment
• Scheduled to run at a later date or at a specified frequency

Abel was designed at the outset to be used internationally, so date formats and currency formats are flexible. e.g. A user in the United States and a user in the United Kingdom can run the same report and each user will get their preferred date format and specified currency.

Report Writer

You can use Abel’s built in report writer to define additional reports if required. You can use one of the many templates provided within Abel or you can ‘start from scratch’.
With Abel’s report writer you can:

• Create a ‘first cut’ using Abel’s automatic report builder
• Create calculated fields
• Create custom report filters
• Have full control over page formatting with multi-level totalling and sorting
• Change the format of groups, lines or fields depending on the value in a field to highlight data according to your KPIs
• Define a “benchmark line” that prints a line across the report at a value that you specify to highlight data that is above or below expectations

Underneath the report writer is a powerful engine that selects the data, calculates fields, sorts the data, computes totals, and then formats the report to your own design.

Abel’s Report Writer includes the Statistics Framework that enables you to analyze your data using statistics important to your business e.g. $ per kilometer, $ per kilogram, $ per barrel etc. You can:

• View meaningful trends by tracking and comparing key statistics over time ($ per unit of product or service consumed or delivered etc).
• Compare key statistics between different branches.
• Report statistical data from a single Abel database or from multiple Abel databases.

SQL Export

Abel includes specific capability for exporting data to MySQL™, Microsoft® SQL Server and Azure® SQL for use with external reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

We provide a data dictionary that allows you to choose what tables and fields you want to export. You can also name them to suit your requirements.

Abel’s SQL Export supports both incremental export and full export. The incremental export only extracts changes since the last export, is faster than the full export and can be run as often as you like, including during the business day.

With Abel’s SQL export you can:

• Choose which tables to export and name them to suit
• Choose which fields to export from each table in the data dictionary
• Export to MySQL™, Microsoft® SQL Server or Azure® SQL as the database type
• Configure the export to run stored procedures before or after a table load
• Run a full export or an incremental export
• Schedule the export for a particular time and frequency

Abel’s SQL export runs as a Scheduled Report which is included in your Abel Base Kit license.

Ad-Hoc Reporting

Many of the standard Abel screens offer the ability to report, email or produce file output of their content. You can print a screen or capture the contents of table data from your screen direct to print, email or delimited file for use in Microsoft® Excel (not just the visible data, but the entire table). So when you need to capture transaction detail or list data, this is very easily done using our standard Abel screens.

Also, many of Abel’s screens offer drill down to the detail ‘under the covers’, right down to the transactions with their foreign and local currency values and General Ledger postings from each line of a document (such as a customer invoice) and other document details, such as who opened, posted and closed the document. Screens that are part of a workflow also offer links backward and forward between related documents in the workflow (e.g customer invoice, customer dispatch, customer order). This is configurable to match your workflow.

All major screens have a button for reporting and you can configure the reports that you want to quickly access when using the screen. The reports can include standard reports, or reports you have created using the report writer.

Real Time Trading Data

Abel can be configured to capture the Sales, Cost of Sales, Quantities and Purchases automatically every time a transaction is posted. Because Abel tracks the cost of sales along with other sale data, your Profitability Analysis is accurate and up to the minute. This approach makes sure your crucial reporting and enquiry screens are fast and real time.

Your Abel installer can configure how Abel captures the sale and purchase data to suit the requirements of your business. This can be set up to track sales and purchases by any or all of:

• Product
• Client (Customer or Supplier)
• Employee (Sales Account Manager or Purchasing Officer)
• Department/Branch

Similarly Sales Budgets can be set up for these same groupings to provide you with budget v actual comparisons that are meaningful to your business.

Budgets and Forecasts

Abel’s budget and forecast functionality compliments the reporting area and enables you to compare actual results with budgets or forecasts in your reports. You can create multiple budgets and forecasts as required to capture projections for changing conditions. Budgeting screens within Abel are configurable to capture the budgets and forecasts required for your business:

• General Ledger Budgets
• Department Budgets
• Customer Budgets
• Employee Budgets
• Product / Inventory Budgets
• Project Budgets