“During our two-day XL Reporter training and implementation, the consultant was thorough, and very patient with us as we moved along the learning curve of the program. The depth of the solution is really impressive, and I'm confident that both our skill at using XL Reporter and the benefits we will reap from it will advance rapidly. All in all, a great implementation experience".

Customer Profile

Ghann's Cricket Farm, Inc. is one of the largest producers of fish bait, feeder insects and related supplies in the world. Founded by Aubrey S. Ghann in 1952, has enjoyed strong growth over the years and is known for high standards of quality, service, and dependability by thousands of faithful customers. Based in Georgia in the United States, Ghann's Cricket Farm is now managed by Aubrey's son, Clay A. Ghann, President and CEO.

Challenge

Clay Ghann was looking for a reporting tool that would integrate directly with all the modules in the company's accounting system, and that would leverage the staff's current Microsoft Excel skills. Easy report authoring with strong formatting and graphical capabilities were also important selection criteria. After evaluating different alternatives, the choice fell on XL Reporter, an Excel-based reporting software from Solver, Inc.

Solution

Working with an XL Reporter consultant, training and implementation was completed in two days. “We used the standard sample data & reports until we had a handle on the way things worked, and then we dove into our live data, and were able to get a number of really good reports done that will be useful to us IMMEDIATELY” explains Clay Ghann. The reports developed during the two-day implementation included: Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, as well as a number of different sales reports, including Monthly Sales Analysis by Quantity and Price. Maybe the most exciting new report is a Sales and Operations Dashboard. The dashboard shows Revenue and Cost of Sales by Product with Product Margin. Each of these also has comparison to last year. It also includes analysis was done by item by quantity. “The reports will enable management to quickly do Sales Analysis by customer in a matter of minutes where the same task would take hours with a manual process. We also plan on creating daily sales reports which we are currently calculating by hand” continues Clay Ghann.