XLC v. Spreadsheet Server

My company is in the implementation phase for Epicor right now. We’ve purchased licensing for XLC and were told this is what we’ll use to create most of our financial reports and extract data from the system. We haven’t built out much of our reports yet and were just recently told that Epicor will move away from XLC in the next couple years and move to Spreadsheet Server. Nobody at my company has experience with SS, and even our consultants haven’t used it in a while. We’re wondering if we should cut ties with XLC and move to SS now since we haven’t done a whole lot in the first software, or is SS a pain, worse than XLC, and we should hold off on the migration for a few years.

Does anyone have any experience or opinions on ease of use, ease of learning the tool, capabilities, etc. for one v. the other?

Thanks in advance!

We use Spreadsheet Server for our financial reporting, and the accounting team and management seem to like it well enough. It’s been mostly set-it-and-forget-it except for whenever we’ve upgraded versions, but that has been fairly painless in the 6+ years we’ve been using it. We recently brought on a new company and the accounting team was able to train the president and controller of the new company wihtout IT’s help.

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That’s great feedback. Do you know if your own staff were able to set up/create all your reports initially or if you needed to use consultants?

I’m honestly not sure. XLC was implemented before I started here, but we haven’t used a consultant for it since I’ve been here.

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Did you require consultants when you switched to Spreadsheet Server?

Sorry. I meant Spreadsheet Server, not XLC. We’ve been using Spreadsheet Server since we implemented Epicor which was before I started here.

We’re in the middle of migrating from XLC 5 to Spreadsheet Server. So far, my finance team thinks they’ll be able to handle doing the migration of individual reports once I have spreadsheet server rolled out to their PCs (which runs alongside XLC5 we are told) - and it seems IT (me) was able to handle doing the installation/setup of Spreadsheet server using all the provided documentation. So we might be able to do the entire migration project using 0 hours of professional services. I’ll try to remember to update you on this.

We did get a license of Query Designer and we’re liking that so far. Excel makes copying and pasting a SQL query you already have written in SSMS a real chore, especially if you want to have some parameters, and this seems to do that nicely. I’m still trying to figure out how to use the Distribution Manager and Profile Scheduler though to automate some stuff.

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