DATA MART FOR EXCEL (D4E SQL)

SOlve the 80/20 dilemma of time spent on data gathering VS. data analysis by USING INNOVATIVE tools to COMPRESS reporting TIMES.

The app can be part of an enterprise data architecture such as:-

- Core Enterprise Systems (Oracle GL, DW, CRM, Cloud Data),

- Tools for data transformation and delivery (BI tools, PEGA, Informatica, Microstrategy), and

- Tactical solutions to meet ad-hoc reporting needs (Oracle FSG, TM1, Solvexia).

YOUR CURRENT UDA's Are end-user computing TOOLs that support FINANCE & IT FOR: 

-   Data Storage,

-   CALCULATIVE Processes,

-   Data Visualization,

-   High-Fidelity Reporting.

However, continuous use of end-user maintained supporting tools in Finance is not SOX/ICOFR-compliant and ultimately results in "Excel hell".  Data Mart for Excel (D4E SQL) provides a systems solution that eliminates end-user maintenance of Excel-based tools by:-
- moving all Excel calculative processes and ETL to the enterprise environment via an external apps store,

- moving all Excel permanent data storage to enterprise databases,
- allowing only non-update user reporting (e.g., data visualization, what-ifs, high fidelity presentation) in Excel, and

- replacing an unlimited number of UDAs (e.g., Excel macros, MS Access, SQL scripts) with a single integrated system hosted in Excel.

3rd-party solutions that address UDA's today completely miss the point that many users still want to use Excel wholly.  These 3rd-party solutions are typically bolted to 3rd-party GL's and DB's; and therefore want to completely replace/remove Excel out of the loop (and then only provide a last-minute download of the final output to Excel.)

Does your accountant work so closely with Financials that he can see the wires coming out of the Financials database server?

Empower your accountants further by providing reporting access to bare-metal Financials data from the comfort of MS Excel.

Create user apps that understand your Financials and access them directly from Excel - no web logons, no "export to Excel", no intermediate steps.  Using the Excel environment only, automatically generate and publish hundreds if not thousands of high-fidelity customised reports every month for top management.

Immediately report and analyse Financials data securely from Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP Netweaver BW or other General Ledgers. With user apps linked directly to GL tables, your accountants do not have to wait for OLAP/BI refresh after posting a journal. With Data Marts integrated with Excel and delivering data right into spreadsheets, your dashboards can be refreshed with real-time production data without leaving Excel.

Data Mart for Excel (D4E SQL) is the tool for accountants because it provides business intelligence and enterprise reporting capabilities that inter-operate with MS Office. The application integrates with menu options and toolbars but is not embedded in spreadsheets. The app creates spreadsheets with financial data extracted from databases. It does not use external formulas that can become missing values (‘#NAME?’) inside cells. (Instead, The app uses key values in the sheets top-most row and left-most column as well as the the tabsheet name to access user apps and ODBC databases.) Consequently, the spreadsheet integration provides the highest-fidelity formatting of Financials that only Excel can provide. It can be refreshed, signed-off, sent to managers or submitted to the Board as is. Because there are no external formulas, other accountants/managers (without the app) can receive, open, analyse, annotate, and then send back the spreadsheet for instant reuse within teh application.

Chief Financial Officers

As the head of a large Finance team, do you feel you are being bogged down by the 80/20 dilemma of "data gathering" versus "data analysis"? Wouldn't you like to have a tool that can compress your team's data gathering time, allocate more resources to data analysis, and leave the rest of the pack in the performance race?

Many CFO's today are inundated with the preponderance of Business Intelligence tools that offer to improve the analysis of financial data.  Business Intelligence and OLAP tools offer the ability to slice-and-dice large amounts of information to provide a single metric. This helps the managers and the management accountants. But it does not help the Financial Accountants who have to collect accurate and reconciled information before analysis.  It is this financial accounting work that needs to be compressed as it accounts for 80 percent of your time and resources. The very latest BI tools will try to squeze the data analysis time, but without working on compressing data collection time, your 80/20 benchmark actually gets worse!

What is needed is a tool to help Financial Accountants improve the time they take to prepare accounting information. Data Mart for Excel (D4E SQL) is the tool you have been looking for because its powerful filtering and parameter processing provides a way for the Financial Accountant to slice-and-dice information from a large database, and produce, not a single metric, but a manageable set of results tailored to the financial accounting requirements. Without this tool, the alternative is for the Financial Accountants to depend on drill-downs with a lot of guess work - hoping that the required set of transactions and balances will appear on one of several ways to drill-down. It can also involve a tedious amount of search using large spreadsheets, if the results are not easily managed.

This application provides the Financial Accountant a way to create a subset of any General Ledger information, by applying powerful filters across any segment codes and other parameters. With powerful filters, you are able to search based on a simple list of values, ranges, patterns or any combination thereof. Because the app actions are integrated with MS Office, you experience MS Office and Excel's familiar look-and-feel. The powerful filters can be re-used in other searches and therefore provide the Financial Accountant a way to repeatedly massage/refine/manage the resulting data searches until the accounting data is complete, accurate and reportable.

Does your company have UDA's (user developed applications) scattered all over the place that it's a nightmare just to change a server name.

Store all your ex-UDA's (including SQL, ODBC connections and credentials) in one secured, central repository for easy maintenance and SOX compliance.

Prove that you have financial and risk control over all your finance processes to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 (Section 404).

Convert UDA's into user apps in seconds and watch them inter-operate seamlessly with the Excel ribbon. Parameters can be entered and complicated ex-UDA's simply become one-click actions. Have confidence that the extract process is using the same secured data mart each time, and not some unstable error-prone UDA.

In your yearly attestations for Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002, report the existence of only one system (such as this app) instead of hundreds. All future extract processes incorporated in data marts (robots) do not need to be documented separately as they share common financial control points. Extract and analyse your Financials data securely from Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP Netweaver BW or other General Ledgers - without risk of losing financial control.

Data Mart for Excel (D4E SQL) can provide the financial control points that auditors look for because of business intelligence and enterprise reporting capabilities that inter-operate with MS 365.  The app exists in menu options and toolbars but is not embedded in spreadsheets. The app creates spreadsheets with financial data extracted from databases. It does not use external formulas that can become missing values (‘#NAME?’) inside cells. Consequently, the spreadsheet can have the highest-fidelity formatting of Financials that only Excel can provide.

The problem with many 3rd-party solutions is that: a) the company is unable to utilize the mass of Excel expertise from new employees or from the web, b) current Excel experts are forced to abandon their chosen expertise and be limited to what is currently provided by the 3rd-party tool, and c) finally the company is forced to a migration path with the 3rd-party vendor in the foreseeable future.

Data Mart for Excel (D4E SQL) keeps all end-user Excel functionality but only elevates data retrieval functions to align with enterprise data strategy and governance (including change control, accuracy, security, disaster recovery and service level agreement), thereby mobilizing Excel's strengths in user-friendliness, deep end-user experience, presentation and what-if analysis. As a result, your critical VBA or SQL code or PowerBI M-queries or DB credentials, are now converted and re-homed (still editable via change control). End-user applications will be subject to the same robust data and logic controls as the rest of the enterprise financial reporting process.

As a best compromise, it is also possible to allow expert Excel users into the the app's development tools, and deploy developed apps) to basic end-users.

STILL COncerned about GOVERNANCE AND security? 

The app add-in is a secured DLL based on C/C++ software that does not contain enterprise code or data. All enterprise code is stored securely in a separate location and application users can be vetted using their Windows profile (i.e., corporate Userid/Password). In addition, the apps projects/applications are developed to use an application DB userid/password that is encrypted and only available internally. This allows for safe execution of tested SQL commands on high-performance production databases including cloud environments.  Although a DB userid/password is used in an ODBC connection; through encryption, the userid/password is known only to the app project/application. This way, the security support team will be able to own and maintain passwords seamlessly without impacting the end-user or automated operations. Furthermore, the app provides API calls that can be used by ordinary VBA programmers to read databases (via dmarts from this app's SQL Apps Store) - using the same process above. This means that with slight tweaks, new VBA applications can conform to the highest levels of governance and security in the enterprise.