Hello everyone,
I am currently testing an advanced reporting add-on for SuiteCRM 7 during a 30-day trial.
We use SuiteCRM in the financial sector, mainly to manage leads, clients, loan requests, quotes/preventivi, practices/pratiche, tasks, calls, meetings, and related operational activities.
Our CRM is fully configured in Italian, including the interface and user language settings. However, the reporting add-on interface appears mainly in English.
My goal is to create advanced reports, especially for custom modules such as “Pratiche”, where I need to show all important information together in one report, including related data from Leads, Clients, Preventivi, Tasks, Calls, Meetings, and other connected records.
For those who have experience with SuiteCRM reporting in real business environments:
- What reporting solution do you recommend for SuiteCRM 7, especially for the financial sector?
- Is it realistic to translate an advanced reporting add-on properly into Italian by modifying language files?
- Are there reporting tools for SuiteCRM 7 that already support Italian better?
- For reports involving custom modules and related records, would you recommend using the native SuiteCRM Reports module, an external reporting add-on, or another solution?
- What should I check during the trial period before deciding whether to purchase the reporting add-on?
Thank you in advance for your advice.
Hello Sami,
if you’ve already leveraged the standard SuiteCRM reports to the fullest, it’s time to look into a different solution.
In general, there are few to none really great reporting / BI / dashboarding solutions in PHP.
Given the stateless technology background and the requirements that people have / expect towards a BI solution it’s just not really possible to build sth. great / smooth / “real timey” in PHP.
You can take the standard reporting very far.
And you can even make it more powerful, but storing more data / data points directly in your CRM (look at concepts / keywords like “kimball data warehouse” / fact tables etc.)
If you’ve outgrown the standard reporting in Suite, try to find an IT solution, where you’ll get read access to the CRM data (and likely other systems to break down the silos and make reporting more useful) and connect to a BI solution.
There, you can build your data models and build up your reports.
MetaBase is incredibly easy, open source, self hosted and very powerful:
However, there are other solutions out there as well.
Most of the “big” software / standard systems nowadays are multi-language - no need to wrestle with old/small/… software which doesn’t meet your requirements.
I’m currently in a fintech as well - depending on your environment, compliance, GDPR etc. Metabase might just be your safest bet.
Additionally, depending on the size of your database, it could be that plugins in your CRM are overloading your web server.
Even around a few 100k - million records, depending on how you join and report there, you can potentially freeze your server.
(which can result into issues with other integrated systems if you don’t have proper request queues with retry mechanisms in place).
