I’ve spent years using the Jet Reports tool. If you’ve never come across it before, it’s an Excel add-in which allows you to write reports and create dashboards by querying your database. Excel is one of those programs that people use all day every day, so having a report that refreshes from your database into Excel for onward work is a fantastic middle-ground for employees and managers to keep track of their KPIs without needing to be IT experts.
Most CRM and ERP systems will come with their own native reports but I’ve always found though, when considering the individual complexities of a business, the native reports can be a bit generic and often lack that one or two fields that would make it a super meaningful report to the business. The great news with a Jet Report is that you can cherry pick which fields you put in.
This isn’t a sales pitch for Jet, even though it probably sounds like it (and I’ll happily take any commission, of course…) My point is that I’m a huge fan of what this tool can do and the avenues it opens up for businesses.
Imagine a generic fixed asset report that just has the asset name, current net book value and very little else. If you wanted to see when you bought the asset, how it’s been depreciated over time and any notes that have been added, this would be difficult and costly to get added in a system generated report. I built this for a customer in a couple of hours and they were absolutely delighted with the flexibility having it in Excel gave them.
I had another customer who were scratching their heads because they had no budget to upgrade their ERP. They had information stored outside their system that they kept needing to either remember or manually add in to get into their numbers. Thankfully, Jet Reporting came up trumps with a refreshable Sales report that had all the additional data sitting on a hidden tab which then pulled in using normal Excel functions to create a simple visual. This enriched the reporting enough to get the customer through to their upgrade a year or so later...and kept the sales team from making excuses about why they hadn’t hit their numbers!
Typically CRMs and ERPs are quite rigid when it comes to reporting, assuming that individual departments will be responsible for just their own items. This isn’t how a lot of businesses operate, so I’ve seen cross-pollination in reporting which usually involves a chunk of manual intervention. This can be avoided with some simple queries written in Jet, which can extract any data from any table in a database and can be linked to other tables with fields in common.
So, what’s the drawback with such a flexible tool?
Well, given the immense flexibility, it can be easy to just pop in another new report on a whim - sometimes a little bit too easy.
I’ve come across customers who have so many Jet Reports that they’ve lost track of what they use them for. I also frequently see reports where team members have piled on with “Can we just add this new column to the existing report?” and the file loses it’s initial purpose and becomes a barrage of data.
It’s remarkably easy to set up the Jet Scheduler so reports arrive in your inbox, all shiny and refreshed, but then nobody reviews them and they ultimately get auto-filed straight into the deleted items folder.
If you have the discipline to keep looking at your reports, and to continually make sure they’re relevant to your business, Jet can give you a lot to work with and can save you time, money and effort.
It can be very satisfying and addictive to keep adding reports though, don’t say you haven’t been warned!
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