Item: Zoho Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used to use Filemaker to try and generate reports for our sales team. The president of the company creates the reports for the owner, the reports were clunky and very slow to load. I found that by exporting our data to a csv file and importing it into Zoho Reports I was then able to visualize our reports much easier and faster and involve our other team members to view the reports as well. I set up a cron job on our Mac server to export the data to Zoho Reports every minute so that everything entered in it is updated within the minute from our Filemaker database. The owner is now able to set up his own reports using the custom views and dashboard I created, thus saving our company more than 4 hours a month. And the fact that we are able to create even more reports with the custom aggregate formulas is amazing and very valuable in making decisions moving forward!

Pros and Cons

Simplicity of the web page. Our non-technical owner was able to even create his own report.
The examples are a huge benefit to use a template for our own sales team.
The ability to export to PDF/HTML or Excel is very nice.

iPhone support (i know it is hard because of the screen real estate, but still that is the only way sometimes to view on the road).
The iPad app is a bit slow.

Alternatives Considered

FileMaker Pro is a great database of course, and has many default layouts which are easy to use and look great...however, it was a little too much power for what we need in a simple sales report and harder to collaborate on. We still use Filemaker, just not for the reporting.

Other Software Used

FileMaker Pro, QuickBooks for Mac, MySQL

Data Integration

They actually provided the scripts needed to connect to the database and export nightly - I did not have to write any code. Their online help documentation was sufficient for me to set up the scripts internally to publish every minute. A live connection to our database might be fun for future features, but also might open us for attacks.

Collaboration and Sharing

It is hard for me to rate this one as we have not jumped into the full sharing features of the product. However the little bit that we did use was very straightforward to set up and works perfectly. You definitely don't want just anyone jumping on and messing up your formulas, data, etc.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zoho Reports is very invaluable for any sales team. You can set up forecasting, commission structures, etc., the possibilities are endless. I would imagine you could even use it for anything where analytics would be needed. It is like a graphical Excel, with better design and ease of use. Plus, the way we can use charts is awesome.

Hi I'm a Zoho-holic, and unfortunately just found Zoho Reports and am now addicted to that too!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho Reports