The day to day work consist in keying detailed data in the system. For strategic purpose, the managers need to consolidate the data and use information. Then, they will be able to take the right decision, to establish some management strategies thanks to the information they analysed.

As there are as many possible consolidations, strategic visions, indicators as there are some retailers and / or manager, ibs Reporting permits an administrator to build reports and publish them thanks to different mean of communication.

“build reports and publish them to the right place”

Once the queries are defined, ibs Reporting Report Designer engine may organize or use their results into different reports.

MANAGE YOUR FORMAL DOCUMENTS

General Description:
As ibs Reporting is fully embedded in Soft Solutions' Suite, it permits to make the formal document templates configurable.

Then, the invoice, order, letter templates may be updated by an administrator, without technical intervention and then be used in the different applications.

How to?
The fixed text is directly typed into Report Designer. Then, the report may be linked to the queries which will retrieve the dynamic text (ex: supplier address, contract conditions, ordered items…).

Each field will be inserted in the report designer in the needed place.The ibs Reporting report designer permits then to add some images (ex: Company logo) and the usual font and paragraph edition tools.
Once the formal document template is done, it can be link to the needed application menu through configuration. This way, a company can change in one click of invoice template or order confirmation letter.

As the formal documents are managed in ibs Reporting, it will benefits of the same publication ways than any other report. Then, it may be linked to an ibs Workflow business process (automatically print all the invoices, send the orders to the suppliers by mail…). Depending on the final mean of communication, the administrator may generate these documents in many formats, such as PDF, excel, word, html.

BUILD A DECISIONAL REPORT

General Description:
ibs Reporting also builds some decisional reports. The build reports may be a simple listing of objects in error (example: not signed contracts with the supplier). It may be also a complex consolidated report, using many queries and pivot tables.

How to?
The user first selects the queries, which will retrieve the needed data. Then, he will use the ibs Reporting Report designer to build the charts and table to visualize the information.
Here he may use the Report Designer advanced tools such as pivot tables, conditional formatting, grouping and subtotals, formulas.
The reports have also their own security configuration in case some reports are public or restricted to some specific users or groups of users. The security can be configured on two different levels:

• Display, modify or hide the whole report
• In the same report, display only the data the user is authorized to retrieve in ibs System

Once the report is achieved, the user may choose to link it to a menu or to the KPI portlet to make it available for the end users. When doing this link, he may choose the mean of execution between html, pdf, excel, word.
As it is a report, the administrator may also link it to an ibs Workflow business report to automatically generate the report on a fixed frequency or after a detected triggering event. The most frequent following action is then either to send a mail to a few users or to generate the report on a shared folder, to make it available to the authorized users.

BUILD A SUMMARY REPORT

General Description:
The reports displayed in ibs Dashboard, and some Indicators are also built in ibs Reporting Report Designer engine. They may include many dynamic and visual functions to animate users' dashboards.

How to?
Once the needed queries selected, the administrator may use them into reports and / or charts. The reports are supposed to be short and point out any unusual activity.

Then, to go further into details, the administrator may use hyperlinks to more detailed reports (decisional reports detailed in the upper paragraph). This may open another report, filtered on the selected value in the summary report.

The hyperlink may be also configured to open an application module, filtered on the selected object to take the corrective action in one click (ex: the Indicator displays a list of the contracts in alert and if he clicks on one contract name, the user is redirected to ibs Deals application, in the contract module, filtered on the clicked contract).