Reporting Xpress

Reporting Xpress

Reporting Xpress's Reporting as a Service (RaaS) platform enables your organization to execute its mission better. Better reporting leads to better decision-making and more efficient and effective execution.  Clear and concise reporting is the simplest way to convey information to decision-makers who may not be expert users of your core systems.

hand graphic 2 Reporting Xpress Frequently Asked Questions FAQs (1)

The concept of Reporting Xpress was born out of a need

A couple of seasoned non-profit executives recognized a need to find a more efficient way to manage reporting across the multiple systems their organization relied on.  They saw team members spending way too much time creating and massaging reports in Excel, maintaining email distribution lists for report distribution, and distributing reports that were not always as functional as they thought they should be.  And even with all that work, people throughout the organization wanted information more frequently, without having to learn several new software applications.  

Reporting Xpress was conceived to solve these problems. In the process, we solved a few others.

FUNDAMENTAL MANTRAS

Reporting Xpress values giving anyone who runs and distributes routine reporting, back their time to spend on more strategic efforts. We start there. However, we also have three fundamental mantras that we believe make implementing a RAAS system a no-brainer:

Make better reports

No. 1

If you are going to automate reports, we might as well make them better. Our professional report designers will help you convey your information as effectively as possible.

YOU DRAW IT, WE BUILD IT

No. 2

If you know what you want and can draw it on a piece of paper, we can probably give it to you. It doesn't matter if the data is coming from one or multiple systems.

INCREASE REPORTING FREQUENCY

No. 3

Automated reporting means you can run reports more frequently. Complex reports that you can only produce manually on a monthly basis can be automated to run weekly or daily.

Why Should You Leverage RaaS?

Often, high-value personnel end up exporting data and building data models to generate reports in Excel that look something like what they desire. They usually must repeat this process during every reporting cycle. This process is a significant waste of valuable resources. Reporting Xpress's Reporting as a Service platform extracts data from your

cloud-based systems via API, models that data in a temporary cloud-based JSON data warehouse that gets deleted immediately after processing, and automatically generates the reports of your dreams. There is some upfront work to design and configure the reports to your specifications, but we do that for you as part of the service.

Simplified Security

Security should not be hard. Reporting Xpress leverages Federated Security, the modern way to secure cloud-based applications. If you have a security team, just ask them. They will appreciate it. The benefits include:

  • Users are identified with their existing network logins, no need to manage another set of user ID's and passwords in Reporting Xpress
  • Permissions are based on attributes of your network user
  • Permissions can be wide (all users) or very restrictive (one user)
  • Outputs are stored and transmitted encrypted
  • Optional Multi-factor authentication

Before you go...

A Reporting as a Service solution should make it easier for people to get and consume reports. So, we have wrapped a secure, straightforward, intuitive report distribution system around all the complex technology required to build and execute your custom reports. We are also adding "smart" technology to reports such as alerts that could tell automatically tell you when there is a new version ready or possibly when data in the report has changed. PaperSave User? We are integrated with PaperSave so users can see source documents from this system alongside their reports.

Tableau? Power BI? We can integrate with these visualization tools to expose your dashboards through our system alongside your reports. Most people initially consider a Reporting as a Service system to generate PDF or Excel-based reports intended to be consumed by humans. However, the same automation can generate custom files in any format (CSV, XML, SQL, etc.) for import into other systems, saving more valuable time.

100

REPORTS AND COUNTING

Reporting Xpress Customers

USC

University of South Carolina

University_of_Central_Arkansas_seal.svg

University of Central Arkansas

USC_Linear350

University of South Carolina Engineering

USF

University of South Florida Foundation

Frequently Asked Questions

+
Reporting Xpress's report designers and subject matter experts will work with you and/or your team to design your reports to your liking. We will then implement those reports for you and work with you to validate the results. One of the reasons we have so much control over the look and formatting of reports is that our current report design surface is Microsoft's Visual Studio, a software development tool. Our administrator's console gives you (the client) the ability to change things like filters, date ranges, etc., but the layout is currently controlled by Visual Studio. If you would like to make other changes to report layouts, just let us know and we will be happy to accommodate those. Reporting as a Service includes those changes. We will be releasing a web-based report design surface that will allow you to create reports from scratch, if you so desire.
+
Reporting Xpress can create reports that mimic your existing reports and schedule them to run automatically in our system, but why would you want to? At a minimum, we can brand those reports with your organization's logo and colors and fix all the little nit-picky things that you don't like about even your most valuable reports, such as removing unnecessary columns, adding new columns, reordering columns, adding subtotals by anything, listing donor addresses under their names, etc.
+
We prefer to source data from cloud-based systems that allow API access to underlying data. In some cases, we can also source data from on-premise systems via VPN access, and we can include data in raw file format that you may receive from other vendors.
+
Yes. In most cases we can display custom fields from Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge or Financial Edge.
+
Yes. We have customers running multiple nightly reports for each project across 6,000+ projects and can scale much larger. One of our mantras is: If you can run reports autonomously, why not run them every day? In a Financial Edge NXT environment where "Projects" are utilized, we typically run 1-4 reports for each project daily and distribute or make available those reports to the individual users responsible for those projects. Permissions can be assigned on a per project, per department or any other basis, so users only see information on projects they are responsible for.
+
No time. Reports are generated and distributed automatically. Each report is run and stored encrypted in AWS secure storage. Users can access reports they have permissions to via Reporting Xpress's simple intuitive portal or subscribe for their reports' automatic email delivery.
+
Sure. We can replicate the look of just about anything, and maybe do some things you couldn't do, even with a lot of manual massaging in Excel.
+
Yes. When we say report, we really mean output. A report can be any type of output you would like. The most common formats consumed by users would be PDF, Excel, or HTML, but we can also produce outputs in any other file format. That includes formatted CSV, XML, SQL, or other files meant to be imported into other systems or used by dashboarding or other data visualization tools.
+
Yes. Reporting Xpress can extract data from multiple systems and model that data in our temporary data warehouse. We can then produce reports combining data from any/all those systems.
+
Just about anything you want. We can produce graphs, charts, maps, heat maps, etc., and embed them into reports or produce them as stand-alone outputs.
+
Of course. Reporting Xpress can style your reports and report portal to include your logo and organization's color scheme. We can also produce reports designed and styled to be inserted directly into board or annual report packages.
+
Yes. You can subscribe external users such as volunteers, board members, auditors, donors, etc. to receive reports automatically via email.
+
No. Your subscription fee covers as many unique users as you need.
+
Reports are stored encrypted in secure AWS S3 storage. If your organization is based in a country that requires your data to be stored in-country, we will utilize AWS storage in your country for your data. Remember, all source data is discarded as soon as report processing is complete. We are only storing reports.
+
Amazon’s S3 storage automatically replicates the data across multiple data centers for fault tolerance.
+
Yes. Suppose you have data that you receive from a service provider in the form of a file. In that case, Reporting Xpress can ingest that data into our temporary data warehouse and include it in your reporting model.
+
Reporting Xpress will produce an end-user training manual and provide webinar style training for your users. We have found that our user interface is so intuitive that most users don’t feel the need to attend that training. The quote we hear most often is “It is a website. I don’t need training for a website.” We were hoping people would say that. We also provide one on one or small group training for administrators on how to modify things like report schedules and filters and subscribe external users to reports.
footer-bg-4

Request a Demo