Centralised Reporting: By having a stand-alone reporting tool, you can centralise your reporting processes. This allows you to create standardised reports and dashboards that can pull data from multiple databases (Accounting / Sales / Production / HR, etc) providing a comprehensive view of your organisation's data.
Flexibility and Compatibility: A stand-alone reporting tool that supports multiple databases offers flexibility in terms of data source compatibility. It allows you to connect to different database systems, whether they are SQL-based, NoSQL, or cloud-based databases. Very useful for most organisations as they usually have two or more software systems/databases provided by different vendors/technology providers.
Ease of Use: Stand-alone reporting tools often provide a user-friendly interface and intuitive reporting features. With a single tool, you can design, generate, and distribute reports without needing to switch between different reporting applications for different databases.
Reduced Dependency: With a stand-alone reporting tool, you're not solely reliant on the reporting capabilities provided by individual databases. This means you can create reports without requiring deep knowledge of each specific database's reporting capabilities or querying languages.
Scalability and Performance: A stand-alone reporting tool can offer optimisations for handling large datasets and complex queries, ensuring efficient performance across different databases. It can provide features like caching, data aggregation, and query optimisation techniques to improve reporting speed and responsiveness.
Exporting and Scheduling: Good Reporting / Analytics solutions offer the flexibility to export information in different formats (PDF, Excel, Word, CSV, etc.). This empowers users to work with data in ways that suit their specific needs and enhances data usability across various software applications and workflows. Another useful and interesting feature is the ability to schedule the generation of Reports. For instance, reports then consuming much processing power can be scheduled to run during off-peak hours. You could also schedule specific reports to be emailed to predefines people on a particular day/time.
Therefore, given that most systems come with restrictive reporting solutions where there is often a time and cost associated with generating ad-hoc reports and analysis, a stand-alone reporting solution can provide a lot of convenience, flexibility and costs savings in the long run.