Entrinsik Informer is a web-based reporting and business intelligence application popular in the higher education vertical market. It helps organizations transform real-time data into actionable information by delivering ad-hoc reporting, data analysis, and interactive dashboards.
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Klipfolio
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Klipfolio PowerMetrics is a metric-centric business intelligence platform. Data teams are able to bring all of their data together and create a catalog of verified metrics that end users are able to explore and visualize using self-serve dashboards and reports.
It makes creating queries very easy for end users so not only research or technicians can do it. The availability for creating Live reports that are accessible via Excel on the network has given many of our users the ability to get the information they need in a format they can use without needing someone to translate the raw data
Using Klipfolio is one of the finest ways we can expand our business because it is so simple to use and always has new features that make it better. We also appreciate the excellent customer service they offer. There are several benefits to making this investment in your company's efficiency and profitability. We think it's worth the money.
Simple user-interface: Informer is relatively easy to learn and end users can begin running reports and creating new reports quickly.
Email "burst" functionality: This feature allows emails to be sent out based on data in the report. So for example, a report could be scheduled that would email all student employment managers listing out the specific employees that report to them that haven't submitted their time sheets. Each manager would only see the rows that correspond to their email address.
Analytics and grouping: Users can quickly drag columns to group and sub-total, and can use the analytics tab to get deeper insights into the data.
There are a lot of reports that we have in Informer that say they have never been run, even though I know they have been run. So that makes it really difficult to determine which reports can be deleted to keep a tidy report list.
The only other complaint I have about Informer is that there doesn't seem to be a properly detailed error code/message when the student information system can't be accessed. For example, I am currently trying to move Informer to its own standalone server and I get an error message saying that our license isn't valid. Informer Support sent a new license, which prompted the same message, and the only explanation they have given me is that Informer can't reach the student information system. I would think that if that were the case, the error message would say that instead of an invalid license.
While Klipfolio covers so many of the bases, one area where I would like to see expansion would be offering additional design and graphics themes for even more customization.
Klipfolio has an extensive offering but might be even better if there were a way that we could integrate with some small to mid-sized CRM solutions for audience list segmentation and marketing integrations.
It would be interesting if Klipfolio could enable us to overlay the data learnings for cross-referencing of multiple client campaigns for comparative insights.
Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.
From the perspective of the new user and a seasoned user I would say eight would represent both parties. It presents a 'familiar' interface and easy to navigate display. Tagging is quite nice and allows for organization of reports based on those tags. These have to be monitored like anything else to keep them consistent but provides a better than average means of organizing reports.
My initial impressions of the software have been extremely positive. There are YouTube tutorials that explain how to make klips. The intuitive design of the UI It appears that everything in this software has been thoroughly tested to create all the visualizations that can be imagined as well as the user input controls that allow users to have exactly the data they want to be displayed in seconds, considering the various functions and formulas available in the Excel integrations and the extensive list of other services that can be integrated.
I would have given 10 but no one and no system is perfect. The only issue with support is not the staff nor the response but the support Wiki and support pages in general run very slow at times. I believe this has been addressed by the company but the technical speed of the pages have been an issue.
It provides all the necessary information to be able to carry out the analysis of any type of business, to know how money is managed virtually, what to do to have greater visibility, in addition to being a platform that is always accessible and allows continuous and efficient work.
We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.
I have experience with Advizor AnalystX, and it was just awful. It is advertised as an interactive reporting tool, in which you can use your mouse to select and segment constituents by where they live (by clicking on a map), how much they've given to your institution, when they last gave, etc. In practice, their map feature was unusable; it's a static map image (imagine a paper map hung on your wall), rather than draggable and zoomable Google Maps, and it required hours of work to configure one map region. As far as computing constituents' giving statistics, it required way too much back-end work to build simple giving totals.
These and many other BI tools are the most direct competitors. I only have experience with Klipfolio and Tableau. Tableau is definitely more capable, but much more difficult to learn and use. Klipfolio is simple and really packs a punch for its simplicity. I have yet to run into a major problem with it lacking a needed functionality.
We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.
