I’m in the same boat. Having been using FA for two years now I do need to
do some management control reporting.
It seems there is no ready option nor any thirdy part that can help. (in
Xero you have Spotlight Reporting)
In the end I’m doing it by myself.
After very hard work (for me) I’m still in the process of making my own
reports.
Here it is my workflow:
make a shell unix script using “curl” commands to be run on my Apple Mac
to export all my tables into an XML format
import such tables into a MySQL hosted server
do some custom SQL views to do my reporting
still in the process of evaluating some tools to have better final
rendering: Excel, Zoho Reports or some iPad Business Intelligence apps…
Problem with “Export All Data” is you don’t get really ALL the
informations. Some fields are not caught nor are some links with projects
or payments… For my accountability needs I put some custom tags into
“po-reference” or note fields.
For light reporting yes you can go that exporting Excel way.
But if you need more detailed reporting then you have to take the API way.
API is not for all, it’s a tricky path.
I’m astonished there is no third party offering a FreeAgent reporting
service like they do with Spotlight Reporting for Xero.
Now FA customer base is rapidly expanding (at least I think so) due their
entering the US market. Hopefully in a near future we’ll get some better
management control functions.from FreeAgent or other companies.
For example the guys from Float are doing an excellent work with cash-flow
management, I’m an happy subscriber. They have the capabilities and the
information to offer a reporting service in case the market would ask for
and there is enough demand.
Why dont you try google apps script and report into google speadsheets? GAS
is great for this kind of stuff! Runs online, from everywhere.
GAS also has scriptDb to do some database work!Op 12 jan. 2013 19:14 schreef “Ossowalt” wmacorig@gmail.com het volgende:
I’m in the same boat. Having been using FA for two years now I do need to
do some management control reporting.
It seems there is no ready option nor any thirdy part that can help. (in
Xero you have Spotlight Reporting)
In the end I’m doing it by myself.
After very hard work (for me) I’m still in the process of making my own
reports.
Here it is my workflow:
make a shell unix script using “curl” commands to be run on my Apple
Mac to export all my tables into an XML format
import such tables into a MySQL hosted server
do some custom SQL views to do my reporting
still in the process of evaluating some tools to have better final
rendering: Excel, Zoho Reports or some iPad Business Intelligence apps…
I evaluated this option, also thank to the advice you gave me about GAS…
Very cool environment, specially if you want to use spreadsheets.
But in the end I wanted to put my data inside a database and I found
difficult to pass through a Google Docs Spreadsheet… At the moment it
seems GAS commands to handle SQL databases are still rudimentary… Not so
easy to parse an XML or JSON and build programatically a SQL statement from
GAS.
If you want to do serious reporting then you need a real database and my
hosted MySQL fitted.
I found convenient do most of my workflow with a unix shell script launched
So now I have a single script I run sometime from my Mac to sync all my
stuff. Then everything is on the cloud on a hosted MySQL I can query from
everywhere, even from my iPad or my iPhone.
I experimenting some very cool iPad Business Intelligence apps too.
Would the Export All Data work for you?
I’ve only been using FA for a couple of months, but I’m going to need
something similar down the line. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but I
thought using the Export All Data option to get my data into an Excel
spreadsheet & then using that as a source for a database/reporting engine
(e.g. Microsoft Access) would give me the ability to generate whatever
reports I needed. Not as flexible as querying the data live, but a lot
easier to get started with.