Treasury Workstation Reporting Capabilities - Our Story

Sujith Nair — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:56:09 GMT

After a recent presentation we did at TMAC, I had the opportunity to speak with someone who had just implemented a web based Treasury Workstation. He was happy with how things were except for the lack of effective ad hoc reporting functionality (the functionality was there but not all data could be reported on). He also mentioned that he liked how we did reporting and had some questions regarding that. Had a product evaluation been available, this customer may have been able to make a more informed decision. However, That made me think of our story again, as in how our ad hoc reporting functionality came into existence. Let me start by referring to a previous post on treasury workstation reporting capabilities here. In that post I was discussing the cost benefits of utilizing a consolidated reporting solution. Now, here is how I describe our Ad Hoc reporting capabilities

Ad Hoc Reporting enables customers to report on any piece of information stored within the system, provided the user who runs the report has access to the data. Yes, you can choose your fields, add multiple conditions, save it, share it and export the data. Users can perform all of these tasks by watching a 5 minute video.

The above sentence pretty much describes our capabilities with reporting at a high level. In this post, I will discuss how our Ad Hoc reporting capabilities came about and how we ensure that the above mentioned features are met successfully. It all started with a need, the need for a first large implementation of our product at a large customer. The cash manager told us that (I almost remember this quote verbatim)

"Well, we have 90 reports that are there in our current systems, I am not sure how many our users use but there are 90 in total. We can try to eliminate the number of reports by speaking to various users but then again, we cannot be quite certain".

Note that we are a mid sized company and access to a large number of developers is not always easily available. We have our constraints and that in some ways promote creative efficiencies within our software development teams. To answer the need of our customer, our product architects decided that we should build an ad hoc reporting tool. That way, we did not have to create a multitude of reports and users could create reports to users themselves. Our development team would not have to create any more reports, ever again.

Currently, we have customers trying out our product online, we are doing multiple presentations and demonstrations of the product and almost every time we are told that our ad hoc reporting capabilities are excellent, the best in class. So, thanks to a need from our customer, our constraints and most importantly sound decisions made by our product architects. A need and a challenge has resulted in an asset. You can read more about our software development thoughts and other products on our parent company blog and directly from a product architect of ours here and on his personal blog here.

Features & Functionality

Treasury Workstation Reporting Capabilities - Our Story