Compass Computer Solutions is a partner of Columbia Ultimate.

Looks may not be your first or only criteria when choosing a life-partner or even a date for Saturday night, but in the world of winning more clients and keeping the ones you have, yes…presentation is paramount. In addition, sometimes those, shall we say, more “demanding” clients seem to have an inexplicable ability to conjure up infinitely interesting reasons as to why they just have to see their inventory reports and statements with these esoteric totals and tilde characters (~~~) that only they understand.

So what’s an agency to do except roll up their sleeves and with a hammer and chisel (or in this case a mouse), push spooler hold files of these reports into Microsoft Excel and sculpt them to match their client’s vision. We have heard stories here of 3-4 days at month-end of report twisting and tweaking to get them just right.

But imagine if you could just highlight the columns and headings from the statement and report hold files once, and then have them dropped into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet automatically each month. Better yet, how about doing a little house cleaning as well, like pasting back together detail lines where the client reference numbers get orphaned on their own lines.

Well, with the Columbia Ultimate companion product, Compass Report Manager, you can do all this and more. Sure, it’s the product that produces PDF’s from your spooler hold files, but now it’s taken on a whole new breadth of capability in the area of report production. So here’s a more comprehensive view:

• Set up templates once for your statements and reports
• Output Adobe PDFs or Excel spreadsheets automatically
• Automatically link them to Columbia Ultimate client, debtor or collector screens
• Use the Compass Windows-based batch printing for high quality output and presentation
• Automatically email reports to selected clients