A challenge for any business or nonprofit organization is the ability to analyze data from multiple sources and transform it into meaningful information. Business Intelligence (BI), analyzes the data for you and creates reports, graphs, charts, and other visual aids to give you further insight into your organization’s performance. A step up from simple dashboards of years past, BI software offers drill down options, forecasting, trends, and alerts that truly help you plan for the future.

Cougar Mountain Software is excited to offer this technology to our customers with our new product, Denali BI powered by Sisense. Below we will talk about three key features of Denali Business Intelligence.

Error-Prone and Unreliable Spreadsheets Are Dangerous to Nonprofit Organizations

Think about it: Without software, your cell phone, computer, and television would just be boxes of circuits and hardware. Software lights and heats your home, and powers your city’s water supply — it’s incredibly powerful. So when Tim Worstall, Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and Forbes contributor, called Microsoft Excel “the most dangerous software on the planet,” he had a good reason.

According to Worstall, spreadsheet-heavy software like Excel is too difficult to manage. “It’s handled in such a slapdash manner that no one is really on top of it anymore.” A lack of controls, inaccurate information, and manually copy-pasted numbers within spreadsheets are too often to blame for financial errors.

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Enhanced payroll reporting is important for all businesses. If your business has employees, you will have payroll responsibilities.

Generating payroll means more than simply paying employees or printing W-2 forms at the end of the year. Old methods of tracking payroll expenses and tax reporting with spreadsheets and manually-prepared documents can result in very costly errors and time-consuming processes. Accounting software can take out the risk and provide a much faster approach to payroll through system automation.

As with any business, manufacturing and distribution companies must remain aligned with their senior management team and government agencies which each have specific mandates related to payroll. These stakeholders not only have specific required reports, but also mandate when they need to be generated. Your accounting software should provide payroll reports that meet these needs.

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