How to Add Visual Indicators to Reports in Sage Intacct

Adding Visual Indicators to Reports in Sage Intacct

Visual indicators help you to understand what your data is telling you at a quick glance.

Sage Intacct has 4 types of visual indicators for reports: conditional highlighting, colour scales, sparklines and trend indicators.

In this week’s tip, we’ll run through each type of visual indicator and how you can add them to your reports.

To get started, navigate to:
Reports > Financial Reports

Open up one of your reports or create a new one. For this example, we’ll use our ‘Profit and Loss – % of Revenue’ report.

The preview tool allows you to check how your edits have changed the report.

To check your report, click ‘Preview’ and then ‘Live report (HTML)’.

Here is what the report looked like before we made any changes.

Instead of making changes to existing columns, we’re going to add new columns for the purpose of this tutorial.

To do this, click the down arrow at the top of a column and click ‘Add column right’.

Visual indicators are added per column.

To add or edit visual indicators, click the ‘Column’ tab and scroll down to ‘Visual Indicators’.

Now let’s run through each type of visual indicator.

Conditional highlighting helps you to highlight values which meet specific criteria.

Change ‘Display in report output’ to ‘Conditional highlighting’.

Then click ‘Edit rules’.

Set up the rules to determine how you’d like the conditional highlighting to work.

For example, we want negative values to show in red, so we’ll set up a rule that says ‘Less than’ the amount of ‘0’ highlight colour is ‘Red’ and the comment is ‘< 0’.

Then click ‘Set’ to save your rules.

This is a preview of the report, which shows the conditional highlighting working.

Colour scales use a gradient to highlight high and low values.

Change ‘Display in report output’ to ‘Colour scale’ and select the colour settings you want.

For example, we want high to low values to show in a green gradient and anything below average to show in red. So we’ve selected ‘Green’, ticked ‘Use a different colour for values below a threshold’, ‘Red’ and the threshold is ‘Average’.

This is a preview of the colour scale formatting on a report.

Sparklines provide a quick graphical representation of how a metric has changed over time and are handy for spotting trends.

Change ‘Display in report output’ to ‘Sparkline’ and for this example we’ll select ‘Expand months’ to get a more in depth analysis.

This is a preview of the sparklines on a report. Each point on the line represents a month in the last financial year.

Trend indicators show whether a value has been increasing or decreasing, compared to the prior period. This option only shows for columns with a period comparison type.

For this example, we’ll change ‘Column type’ to ‘Period difference’.

Change ‘Display in report output’ to ‘Trend indicator’ and then select the ‘Type’ of graphic and ‘Display as’ colour.

This is a preview of the trend indicators on the report.

As you can see, there are arrows which show whether the values have been increasing or decreasing, compared to the prior year.