“We continue to see new areas, like drill down to detail and graphics,where we can use XL Reporter to enhance our financial control and business intelligence capabilities. This solution has been a good investment for us with a fast and painless implementation, and we have worked with skilled product experts that could answer our questions as they came up".

Customer Profile

The Baltimore Ravens operate as a member club of the National Football League (NFL). Since relocating from Cleveland, Ohio, in 1996, the Ravens have strived to achieve success on both the football side of the organization as well as the business side. Success came on the football side in the form of multiple playoff appearances and a victory in Super Bowl XXXV in January 2001. On the business side, success manifested itself in various forms, including accurate budgeting, timely financial reporting and critical financial analysis, At present, the Ravens operate in the relatively stable economic model of the NFL and seek many more football and business accomplishments in future NFL seasons.

Challenge

Jeff Goering, Controller for the Ravens, was looking for a user-friendly report writer that would fulfill his budgeting and financial reporting needs. The tool needed to interface with multiple accounting system modules, including payables, receivables, fixed assets and general ledger. It also needed to report on various account segments, as the Ravens use a four-segment account structure. Furthermore, the Ravens wanted thecapability to print reports directly to an intranet or server location in lieu of voluminous paper copies. And lastly, the budgeting mechanism needed to be Excel-based, so Ravens department heads could prepare and submit budgets in the ubiquitous Excel application. After seeing an XL Reporterdemonstration, Jeff felt it would cover his reporting needs and acquired the solution through his local partner, Aston IT Group.

Solution

XL Reporter was installed at the beginning of the first training day upon which The Ravens' finance department members completed a two-day on-site training session with the XL Reporter consultant. “We worked with our own data during the training class, and it made quite a difference to be able to see our real numbers as soon we started to write reports,” says Jeff. After the two-day training class, several reports were already completed so XL Reporter could be put to use right away. “In the past, we were exporting data to Excel to handle many of our reporting needs, and we can now do the same reports in XL Reporter, keeping the benefits of the Excel environment but adding the advantage of a real reporting tool with a direct connection to our accounting system,” continues Jeff. Some of the key reports the Ravens now produce with XL Reporter include monthly departmental budget-to-actual reports (produced automatically via a report scheduling feature), special events analyses and sponsorship summaries. Interfacing with the payables system, the Ravens also produce reports detailing expenditures paid to various vendors. As a next step, the Ravens are implementing XL Reporter's budget module to provide users with a dynamic, Excel-based budget environment directly integrated to the general ledger.