We are excited to announce that we have released a major update of our service based primarily on YOUR feedback. The one thing we can never say enough….WE WANT YOUR FEEDBACK. Good or bad we really want to hear what is working or not working in Indicee.

So let’s take a look at what our users have asked for in Indicee.

The Entry Point – Indicee.com

The main goal of our website has been to quickly communicate what Indicee does, how it works and how you can get going in 10 minutes or less. We have been focused on doing this in fewer and fewer clicks without losing some of the detail that new users want. Getting users into our application quickly is critical so we added a few key “on boarding” capabilities including:

Free48 – if you are not a Do It Yourself (DIY) type person. Let us get you started in 48 hours for free

Live Chat Support – You will see links to live chat all over Indicee.com. Take advantage of talking to Todd, our friendly support dude, live and in person to help you use Indicee more quickly and effectively.

Online Discussion Forums – our forums are new so we don’t have alot of action in there yet but we are monitoring them regularly. So jump in and start posting.

New Quickstarts

I don’t know anyone that doesn’t like to make things happen fast. Indicee QuickStarts have been designed to provide users with pre-packaged solutions for the most common Small Medium Business (SMB) accounting products on the market. A Quickstart is a pre-built reporting database (we call this a data mart) and a bunch of canned reports that you can use immediately.  If you use applications like Intuit Quickbooks, Sage Accpac, Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains or Softrak Adagio using a QuickStart is one of the best ways to get up and running with Indicee. Simply grab the existing output from your accounting application, load it into the QuickStart Wizard and you will have reports and dashboards that you can view, analyze, share and collaborate on in less than 10 minutes.

What if you don’t have one of these accounting applications? No problem….you can build a solution from scratch yourself or you can give us a call and we can get you started with our Free48. Building something from scratch doesn’t take days. It can be done in minutes or, at the most, hours.

My Stuff Overview

When you login into the Indicee application the first thing you see is the My Stuff tab. This is the main landing page of the application. If you have used our previous version you will see a major user interface redesign to enable greater usability. Here are a few of the changes:

• Replaced the drop down navigation box in favor of a sub-navigation menu.
• Added a “Tips” section that you can toggle between “show” and “hide.” We have created a bunch of videos and FAQ tips that will give you greater self-guidance when using Indicee.
• Improved graphics and layout to highlight “Latest Dashboard and Reports,” “Latest Data,” and “Latest Comments.”

Dashboards

If there is one “big ticket” item that we have added to this release it is Indicee Dashboards. So what is a dashboard? A dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company’s health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, dashboards are becoming “must-haves” for all businesses. Indicee Dashboards are simple to create and use. Traditional Business Intelligence tools usually require technical consultants or IT people to create the dashboard. Not Indicee Dashboards….mere mortals can create them.

Indicee Dashboards will display anywhere from 1-4 key visualizations that are generated by your Indicee Reports. You can share dashboards into private or public groups and users can drill down from a dashboard into a more detailed report. Keep your eye out for a more detailed post on “How to Create a Dashboard.”

Visualizations

Indicee has increased the number of chart types that you can choose from and has incorporated additional features such as data point pop-up bubbles, stacked charts and a table view.

Data marts

First of all let’s just be clear on what a “data mart” is. In a nutshell, a data mart is the “bucket” where we load the data that you upload to Indicee. When you upload your sales data from your accounting system and your customer data from your customer relationship management system, we pile this data into “bucket” and “munge” it all together. During this munging process we create relationships and connections between your sales and customer data. The final result is what we call a “data mart.” It is your supermarket full of data ready for you to browse and create reports.

If you create a data mart, then you need a way to monitor, manage and administer it. We have created a data mart interface where you can manage all aspects of  your data mart, from uploading data to sharing.

I hope you find the usability and functionality enhancements in this new version of Indicee useful. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Mark

Related posts:

1. Indicee and Excel
2. Indicee Launch
3. The Wild and Crazy World of Indicee

“Buy the ticket, take the ride” – Hunter S. Thompson

Now, this isn’t a critique of the inevitable conflicts (real and perceived) inherent between these various groups.  Nor is it a post about the differences between Accounting and Marketing.  In order to do that, I am missing one critical piece.  My good friend Dan’s “Top Ten Differences between Accounting and Marketing List“.  Maybe with your help, readers, we can convince him to give it up.  Add your thoughts in the comments section!

NO.  This post is about posing a simple question:

How are your Year End spreadsheets doing?

Year End is upon us!  Everyone knows, thanks to these accounting blogs:

• Look at Last Year’s File
• Accounting Nation
• Accounting WEB
• CPA Trendlines
• re: The Auditors
• Junior Deputy Accountant (warning: Language)
• and Going Concern

Everyone knows that Audit Professionals have been raked over the coals of more stringent regulation and oversight the past few years (for all the good it’s done!).  And, if my experience is at all representative of our collective experience on the industry side, the auditors have been passing all of that regulation onto you!

Preferred method of passing = The Paddle

The paddle will be heading your way again soon enough.  Time to rollover all those Year End files and clean up for prepping 2009’s close.  The rigors of financial reporting compliance are staring us right in the face once again.  Oh, and Merry Christmas by the way.

Of course, I think that if the past 2 year’s have taught us anything, it’s that regulation is ineffective in preventing fraud.  I would like to know where Frank Abagnale jr. stands on this issue.  Abagnale is the character upon which the movie Catch Me If You Can is based and for the past 35 years he’s been helping the FBI, businesses, and government cope with matters of fraudulent activity.  I highly recommend his book, Art of The Steal, for anyone interested in learning more about specific industry-related fraud risk.

Ultimately, prevention is the key; and if that’s true, historical financial reports will never fulfill that role.  I realize that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but my view is that (anecdotally) auditors are getting hung up on details that bear little or no relation to the real risks.  Reason has been traded for checklists.

Be that as it may, you guys are still going to be toiling over this stuff, at their mercy, in the very near future.  At the same time, you will be expected by your management team to provide ACTUAL insight into the ACTUAL operations of your ACTUAL business.

Operations.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  Here is where you can’t “juke the stats“.  Yet, due to the pressures around the financial reports (case in point above), our operations reports are given second billing (if that – after payroll, A/R and collections, admin, etc).  To give you an idea of how much they are marginalized, there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Operations Reports!

I don’t see the issue with the auditors changing or going away anytime soon.  For me, there’s no reason to be optimistic or to engender optimism in you regarding that!  This is the system we live with for the moment.

Operations Reporting has to find a way to fit within the time constraints given these other pressures.  Either it fits in by 1) doing less or 2) doing more in less time.  How would you prefer to deal with your Operations Reports?

Do you have questions about the difference between Financial Reports and Operations Reports?  What are your views with respect to how this all fits together?  Let us know in the comments (and don’t worry, no salesperson will visit you).

When you talk about the true viability of the business, what does it really mean?

Closing links:

• Here’s a great segment talking about why we should question Ratings Agencies
• Embedded copy of IDCs Predictions for 2010

Enjoy!

Top 10 IT Predictions for 2010

Related posts:

1. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
2. The Roots of Business Reporting Technology
3. The Importance of Stories

New Indicee.com Website

The focus of our new site was to more clearly communicate the uses and benefits of Indicee and to more effectively target the user types that we see jumping into Indicee.  We gave the site a new layout with a video that sits front and center. The idea is to quickly get you up to speed on what Indicee is all about and then offer you the ability to test the application out without ever having to sign-up: Indicee Test Drive.  We hate ‘those sites’ (and we assume you do to) that ask you to give up your first-born child just to complete the “get more information” form. The worst part is that after you fill out the form you find out there is nothing to see and you are going to get a sales guy calling you.  We like the self-serve, try before you buy option better.

Video is something we plan to use more of as we progress. By now you have probably watched the “What is Indicee?” video and I bet you are still scratching your head trying to figure out where we came up with the word “munge!” I will leave that for you to ponder while I tell you that we are going to be continually adding new “how to” videos in the help section that will guide you through all of the main areas of the product. These are not highly polished and produced videos. Instead they are short (less than a minute) and simple videos that cut to the chase. We plan on adding and modifying these on an on-going basis. So check them out and tell us what other videos you would like to see.

Accpac QuickStart

One of our key beliefs at Indicee is that moving you from “This Indicee thing sounds cool!” to “Holy cow that is actually my data on the screen!” needs to happen in ten (yes 10) minutes or less.  Our product was architected with this vision in mind. We are developing a number of QuickStart solutions that will align with the most popular packaged software applications. Our early focus will be on small to medium sized business applications like Sage Accpac and MAS 90, Microsoft Great Plains and Navision, Quickbooks and a number of others.  QuickStarts are pre-packaged datamarts that will enable you to upload reports from your favorite packaged application without ever having to talk to IT.

Our first QuickStart is based on Accpac, a small/medium business accounting software application.  We have created specific sections on our website that communicate more specifically to you, the Accpac user. We even have an Indicee Accpac Test Drive that provides Accpac specific sample data. More importantly we have created a new user interface that guides you through the process of uploading your reports from Accpac including a “how to” help video.

We will be adding a number of other QuickStarts over the coming months. What would be your favorite QuickStart?

Indicee Datamart Designer

As I mentioned above, getting data into Indicee quickly and easily is a key component of our vision.  It is also a major differentiator when comparing Indicee to other business intelligence products. Next time you watch a web seminar from a business intelligence (BI) company ask them specifically how they get your data into their application. Almost all of them will do the “BI dance” and eventually admit that they will need to put a consultant or 10 on the job. At Indicee we not only believe that querying and analyzing data should be self-serve but getting data into the system should be self-serve. That is why we spent the past year building the first version of our drag and drop interface to enable you to create a datamart. No longer does loading and consolidating data need to be done by the “techie folks” in the back room.  We are early in the process so I don’t want to be too cocky and say that our designer will solve every problem just yet. But soon……it will tackle most of them.

Some huge areas of improvement over our last release include our ability to consolidate more than one Crystal Report, Excel spreadsheet or CSV (Comma Separate Value) file into a single datamart.  Now you can grab a report from your ERP system and connect it to a report from your CRM application.  That would be cool right!?  Let’s get back to that “munge” word I was mentioning earlier.

The other cool capability is being able to take a QuickStart, like the one mentioned above, open it in the datamart designer and extended the data in the QuickStart to include sources from other ERP, CRM or virtually any packaged application that has data that can be related to the QuickStart data.  Rather than starting from scratch you can start from something that already exists and build on it.

Data Model Sharing

When you create a new datamart you are really creating a storage location for data. The storage location needs to have some type of structure much like a closet needs to have shelves to store things on. In the Indicee world the equivalent of the closet is what we call a data model. One of the really cool things we can do in Indicee is to share models into public groups to enable other users to be able to re-use the models with their own data.

Question URL Referencing

Every shared question now has a URL that can be referenced directly by other group members via email or social media messaging to help promote the sharing of information across group members. Not much more to elaborate on this one. Short and sweet!

Email Alerts

Letting people know that there is new information available to view in Indicee is important to the overall user experience. We have added optional group settings to enable email alerts that can be sent following common group activities like the addition of data, new questions, new users and more.

Role security

A number of our customers have been asking for more control over how users can view data. More specifically we can apply security that associates a user’s account with particular data in the datamart. For example, If you have a data mart with sales per store, Indicee can associate a user’s account with a particular store and restrict that user to only seeing data from their store. Unfortunately, we do not have a user interface for this feature yet but if this type of feature is of interest to you please send us an email and we can get it set up for you: support@indicee.com

Wow…that was a long post.  What can I say….the team cranked out a whole bunch of stuff over the past few months and I wanted to make sure I told all of you about it.

As usual we would love to hear from you about what works and what doesn’t. We develop our features based on your input.

Mark

Related posts:

1. SaaS…The Holy Grail?
2. Indicee and Excel
3. Hello 2009

When 2008 began we knew there was a demand for a better way to collect, analyze, share and collaborate on business data but we needed the user community to begin helping us shape our services. In August we released our first public beta under the radar…like a stealth fighter flying through Russian airspace. There were no press releases, no fan fare, no hype. Instead we focused on organically gathering early adopter business users that could resonate with the pain of living in what we call “spreadsheet hell.” Business users with an analytical focus that spend their days cobbling data together from numerous reports and data dumps into tools like Excel were our target users. This problem is widespread and I can guarantee you that if you talk to ANY business analyst in ANY company of ANY size they will confirm my assertion.

The focus of our beta program was not the typical web start-up strategy…..”let’s just get a bunch of email sign-ups so we can tell our investors that we have thousands of users!” Instead we have focused on gathering a smaller number of quality Beta customers that work very closely with the Indicee team to help define the workflow, user interface design and overall feature set.  We have customers using Indicee across numerous industries including manufacturing, legal services, consumer products, food and beverage and retail. The best part is that these customers are validating our early assertions and the product is already spreading to more and more users in each organization.

But we didn’t stay under the radar for too long. In November one of our local Vancouver newspapers got wind of the Indicee story and did a feature on our venture.  It was great to get a bit of buzz and it led to a steady stream of new users and customers. But really we are still flying under the radar until a bit later in 2009.

I like to think of 2008 as our “build year” and 2009 as our “launch” year. I won’t hold our product team to any hard dates just yet but we are targeting our first commercial release in Q2 2009. What does “commercial” mean? Simple….if the Indicee service is something you would pay money for then it is ready for the commercial tag. We are going to be working with each of you, as a member of the Indicee community, to help us define what “commercial” looks like.

So what can you count on coming in 2009?

• 1. Improved reporting and analysis features – calculations, comparisons, summaries, charting, enhanced question user interface, data filtering and more….we call these table stakes business intelligence features that almost every user will want.
• 2. Quickstarts – we will be creating pre-packaged solutions for targeted accounting and ERP products like Sage MAS 90/200, Accpac, Quickbooks, Navision, Great Plains and more. The goal is to enable you, the business user, to upload existing canned reports from any of these applications and be up and running in 15 minutes or less. We won’t be able to tackle all of these Quickstarts in 2009 but you can count on 2 or 3 at the very least.
• 3. Data Import – one of the big differentiators of our service is the ability to take existing reports or Excel files and upload them into Indicee without having to call up your IT person. Enabling you to use files you have at your fingertips liberates you from having to talk to IT every time you want to do something with your data. If you are using Indicee now you will know that we only support single file data imports. In 2009 that will change and we will be adding the capability to get data from multiple sources and relate the data together in our data import process. Imagine being able to get a canned report from your accounting application and your CRM application and then mash them together. That is powerful and that is where we are going!
• 4. Online subscription and payment – I know, I know…free is better but at some point we would like to make money. But not to worry…we will always have a free version of the service. For the paid version you can count on monthly and annual subscriptions that can be done via credit card.

I can’t tell you everything we are working on! I have to keep a few things secret but these 4 key areas all fit under the umbrella of what we call self-serve business intelligence. We aren’t quite there yet but 2009 will be all about making Indicee more and more self-serve from the way you learn about the service, to the way you buy the service and to the way you utilize the service.  In the short term our team has to do a bit of the work to get you up and running but each time we do that we are defining more clearly how our self-service capabilities need to work.

Do you have a business problem that Indicee might be able to solve? Do you use accounting or ERP packages like Sage, Quickbooks, Microsoft Navision or Great Plains and are you struggling to get the information you need? I would be interested to hear about your business challenges that revolve around data, reporting and analytics.

Thanks for your support in 2008 and I wish each of you all the best in 2009!

Mark
Founder & CEO, Indicee
twitter.com/indicee

Related posts:

1. Indicee named to the 2009 Ready to Rocket List
2. Automate your data uploads
3. Indicee Launch

At Indicee our goal is to enable business users, which include analysts, managers and other information consumers, to make better and smarter decisions. When we started building the Indicee product, our focus was not to build another BI tool like we did when we created Crystal Reports. Instead we focused on building an environment of collaboration and community around data and information.  If you look at most Web 2.0 productivity type applications like Basecamp you will see collaboration at the heart of what they are doing.  Indicee is taking a similar approach and the decision to move BI into the “cloud” was very strategic for this reason. Giving a business user the ability to easily access, consolidate, analyze, share and collaborate on information from inside and outside the firewall becomes a powerful story.  This moves well beyond a user’s ability to put together a spreadsheet full of data that can be emailed around. The implications of creating a network of users, from both inside your company and cross company, that can share, discuss, debate and compare data and information really creates a new paradigm for BI.

In the short term, Indicee is providing a lot of value to our early adopters by eliminating much of the complexity and time that they were devoting to the creation of complex “spreadmarts” (see TDWI report on Spreadmarts). If you really dig into these spreadmarts you will find that they are just data stores put together with hours of manual effort.  The typical business user is already pulling their hair out by the time they get to the point of using the really valuable features in Excel.

Indicee will reduce or eliminate the painful process of manually accessing and consolidating data. The application can then surface up the data in a friendly way using a word based “question” interface that enables the users to quickly reveal interesting and informative insights based on the mashed up data.  Users can share and collaborate around this information or take the next step of pushing the information to various external tools and applications. Pushing data back into Excel and Adobe PDF is already integrated into the product, but we see many interesting ways to push information through Email, Blogs, RSS feeds and Facebook.

Pushing data back into Excel makes sense for many business users because they are interested in doing things like forecasts or what-if type analysis, which is really where Excel shines. In fact we see an opportunity to more tightly integrate with both Excel and Google Spreadsheets right inside the Indicee application.  I can give you more details on this in the future.

Our long-term vision is to focus on the big picture value proposition of what Indicee offers to our users. This is the ability to easily mash up data from any source like Excel, Access, packaged applications (ERP, CRM), SaaS applications (Google, Netsuite, Salesforce.com), data aggregators and other public data sources to enable user generated content creation that can be shared, collaborated on, published and pushed anywhere both inside and outside the firewall will turn traditional BI on its head. Combine this with the message of collaboration, access-from-anywhere and zero-footprint brings an extremely compelling value proposition to business users.

At the end of the day when I do my own BI work I use both Excel and Indicee. They both fit into my daily workflow and each has their strengths. My goal as a business user is to be more productive and the more tools and applications I have to enable that the better. I envision Indicee working along side countless applications just like Excel to create a new, collaborative BI world.

Related posts:

1. Indicee Launch
2. Indicee for 2010 : New look, New product, New offerings
3. The Pain That Indicee Solves… Metaphorically Speaking