Sometimes you just have to!
Let’s be honest —despite your Sage consultant’s recommendations to eliminate outside systems, sometimes you just want to export data from Sage 300 CRE in Excel. And when we approach year-end preparation time, it is particularly helpful in preparing reconciliation worksheets that you may eventually send to an outside CPA or auditor.
The software includes hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-built reports and inquiries to help you get started. You can create custom versions of reports and inquiries using Report Designer, Crystal Reports, and Inquiry Designer if you’ve purchased those applications.
However, for those who love the on-the-fly flexibility and power of Excel’s subtotals, pivot tables, and other features, a number of options are available to you.
Four ways you can get it done
Office Connector (OC)
You can purchase this Sage product through your local business partner. The various licenses let you create refreshable queries of your Sage 300 CRE data, as well as create custom import templates and even write data directly to certain fields in your database.
ODBC/Microsoft Query
This method requires no additional purchase and uses Microsoft components that Windows typically installs automatically on any computer.With a little setup, you can create read-only refreshable queries, but the manipulation of the data is sometimes more limited than what you can do with Office Connector. For instance, you can’t insert a calculation column in the middle of a query as you can in OD.
Printing reports to .txt
For those of you who have tried this, you know that it works only some of the time and that the results can just be…well, ugly. The reports you choose to print to a .txt file type should be those with well-defined columns, fields with duplicate information printed on every line of detail, and few or no subtotals so that when you import the .txt file into Excel, there is a minimum amount of cleanup to do.
Inquiries
Several versions ago, Sage responded to user requests for easier Excel access by adding the long-awaited button to the Inquiry window. Inquiries are one of the software’s most useful features. You can add or remove columns, filter data, add formulas, and print to PDF or paper—with totals—or export to Excel. You may need to format columns used for sorting, as leading blank spaces can appear in dates, job numbers, and similar fields.
Related article: How to Export Financial Statements to Excel.
If you would like information about the advantages/disadvantages of these choices or training in how to use them, click here!
by Kyle Zeigler, Sage Senior Certified Consultant