In order to manage their financial operations, most mid-sized companies use either a standalone accounting application or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. These systems are ideal for capturing and processing transactional business data, but they were not designed to convert that data into meaningful business intelligence (BI), and they lack good analytical and reporting tools.

Many large organisations have addressed this problem by investing in sophisticated, expensive software and employing specialist analytical staff, but few mid-sized companies are able to do this. However, a growing number of BI applications are now available to midsized companies.

Business intelligence tools offer an increasingly attractive solution to unlocking value from stored data. These products, available from a number of companies, including Sage, provide a convenient and powerful control point for bringing critical financial and other data together in a manageable form.