its capacity to improve your business operations is limited. Many companies rely on Excel for day-to-day data reporting, but they don’t realize how much easier, faster, and more secure their reporting could be with the right tools. In this blog, we’ll show how Interject and a custom solution from Laminin can take your company’s business reporting to the next level of efficiency and accuracy.

The Comfort (and Chaos) of Excel

Employees across nearly all industries use Excel in their daily workflows—it’s a familiar and flexible tool for data organization, analysis, and visualization. One of its greatest advantages is its versatility; it can handle everything from simple calculations to complex financial modeling. With functions like pivot tables, conditional formatting, and formulas, users can efficiently analyze large datasets. Additionally, Excel’s charting capabilities make it easy to visualize trends, aiding in decision-making. The automation features, such as macros and Power Query, also streamline repetitive tasks, saving time and reducing errors.

Despite its strengths, Excel does have limitations. When your business starts growing, spreadsheets become harder to manage: too many tabs, manual updates, and potential for errors. Excel can become sluggish when dealing with extremely large datasets, as it was not designed for handling big data efficiently. Errors can also easily occur due to manual data entry, and small mistakes in formulas can lead to inaccurate results.

Excel is a powerful tool, but in certain circumstances it can limit and constrain its users. That’s where Interject comes in.

What Is Interject, and Why Is It So Useful? 

Interject is an Excel add-in that connects your spreadsheets to live, secure data across your business, whether that’s in your API or SQL databases. With Interject, you can automate reports, pull real-time numbers from your systems, and avoid risky copy-pasting. You can also push data back to its source right from the Excel interface, saving countless hours of manual updates and tedious copy/pasting.

Here are even more benefits of using Interject with Excel:

• Enhanced collaboration: Through Interject, you can collaborate on documents through the Report Library—a single location for all of your company’s reports. Each report comes with version control and permission control at the level of teams or individuals. In addition, Interject allows comments to be saved back to the database with the comments linked to key elements in the report (for example, comments on an Aged Receivables or Aged Payables report can be linked to the particular transaction or organization referenced in the report).
• Connected reports: Interject’s Report Drill tool connects your reports hierarchically, allowing you to navigate from one level of detail to another with a single click.
• Extended report building tools: With Interject, you can pull multiple data sets into a single report. You can also restrict your data import through user-defined import criteria, ensuring that only the most relevant data appears in your reports. You can also retain formatting as needed.

With Interject, you no longer have to change live, contextual data into static numbers on a detached report that must be updated manually. You can work directly with your business data, editing and reporting on it from within the familiar Excel interface.

Why Custom Development Matters

 “But wait, there’s more!” Out of the box, Interject is powerful—but every business has different systems and goals. That’s where custom development from Laminin comes in: we help shape Interject around your needs. Whether it’s pulling data from your ERP, setting up scheduled refreshes, or building a custom dashboard, we can make Interject fit perfectly within your workflow.

For a partial list of custom projects we’ve completed with Interject, check out our blog post here. Some of the projects we’ve done include custom commands, voucher lines, and an integration to PeopleSoft. We also specialize in helping businesses access important historical information stored in out-of-the-way software—a custom Interject solution means no more training employees on obsolete systems. Instead, they can access the data they need through Excel.

Our most common project is integrating Interject with Epicor. One of our clients had this to say about our Interject integration: “The fact that Interject functions directly within Excel saved our finance team countless hours. They can now pull exactly what they need, drill down into details, and securely manage reports—all with minimal effort.” To read the whole success story, click here.

Still Using Excel the Hard Way?

 If you’re ready to improve your business reporting capabilities with Interject, let’s talk! We’d love to discuss your company’s unique needs and how Laminin can design the perfect custom Interject solution to meet those needs. Contact us today to get started!