Most of it is already in there.
Almost every conversation that starts “we need a BI tool” turns out, an hour in, to be about a report Cin7 Core already ships and nobody has opened. So this page starts where the work should start: what the built-in Reports module actually does, then the specific places it stops, and only then the two platforms worth putting on top of it. If you leave having found the report you needed, that is a good outcome and it costs you nothing.
Open the report you have already paid for.
The Reports module is deeper than its reputation. A good deal of what people describe as a missing report is a saved layout, a prefilter or a permission away, and the help centre carries a “which report do I need” article precisely because the list is long enough to get lost in.
The best part of a hundred reports across sales, inventory, purchasing, production, financials and audit, each with reporting periods, comparison periods, currency selection and a filter on every column. Star the ones you use and they pin to the top of the list.
Columns and rows are dragged into place, extra fields added from Configure Layout, and the arrangement saved as a named layout you can come back to. Prefilters stack conditions with AND, OR and NOT, nested into groups, which is a good deal more than most people realise is there.
Financial reports can be published as a locked read-only snapshot with the data, settings and date range frozen, footnoted cell by cell, then archived. The audit report tracks user actions with old and new values, and sits behind a permission of its own.
Ask Me Anything answers questions about your live data in conversation, builds a chart or a table from the answer, and lets you drill in with follow-ups. It needs the ForesightAI add-on, which in turn needs sales history behind it before the answers mean much.
Where it stops, and it does stop.
There is no fully custom report. Customisation means reordering fields, adding or removing pre-built columns, filtering and prefiltering, and that is the whole of it. If the figure you want is not a column on some existing report, no amount of layout work produces it.
It also only knows what is in Cin7 Core. A report cannot join your stock to your ad spend, your delivery costs or a channel’s fees, and it cannot see the sales history from whatever you ran before go-live. One account is one report: there is no built-in way to roll two Cin7 Core entities into a single figure, because the system is designed around one organisation at a time.
And two of the things people assume are included are separately subscribed. Scheduled report emails and event notifications run on the Automation module. Ask Me Anything and the forecasting reports run on ForesightAI, which needs at least six months of sales history to work at all and, in our experience, closer to nine before the output is worth planning around.
- ✓ Custom reports are not a feature; saved layouts and prefilters are
- ✓ Nothing outside Cin7 Core can be joined to a Cin7 Core report
- ✓ No roll-up across two Cin7 Core accounts
- ✓ No pre-go-live history unless it was migrated in
- ✓ Scheduling and alerts sit behind the Automation module
- ✓ Financial and inventory totals can differ legitimately, and often do
Sorted by whether it can change anything.
Our other platform pages group this list by how each app reaches Cin7 Core. Here that would tell you nothing, because all three run on the Cin7 Core API rather than a built-in connector, which makes API access on your subscription the precondition for any of them. The distinction that actually decides between them is whether the tool only reads your data or can also act on it, so that is the grouping.
A reporting layer over the top. It pulls the Cin7 Core data model out, models it, joins it to whatever else you run, and gives you dashboards and scheduled reports on the result. What it does not do is change anything in Cin7 Core, which for a reporting tool is a feature rather than a shortcoming.
- Easy InsightModelling and dashboards across sources, read-only
These write back. A report that spots the problem is worth less than one that also raises the purchase order, and that is the line between the group above and this one. It is also the line that decides how carefully the thing needs governing, because anything able to change a record is able to change the wrong one.
- Wink ToolboxCross-system reporting and automation that can write back
- ZapierThe lightweight two-app answer, alongside the Automation modulean automation tool, not a reporting platform
Three things to know before you shortlist.
None of them replaces Cin7 Core. Stock, costs, orders and fulfilment stay where they are, and every one of these tools is a layer reading from that. If a proposal reads as though a reporting platform becomes the system of record, something has gone wrong upstream of the proposal.
None of them is live by default either. Both platforms hold their own copy of your data and refresh it on a schedule, so a dashboard is as current as its last refresh unless somebody has deliberately configured otherwise. That matters most for the report somebody wants to make a same-day decision on, and it is worth settling at scoping rather than in the first week.
And a reporting layer inherits your data quality rather than fixing it. If products are categorised inconsistently, or costs were never landed properly, the dashboard renders that faithfully and in colour. In our experience the tidying is the larger half of the job, which is the honest reason a reporting project sometimes starts with a system audit instead.
- ✓ API access on your Cin7 Core subscription is the precondition
- ✓ Cin7 Core stays the system of record for stock and orders
- ✓ Reports run on a refresh schedule rather than on live data
- ✓ Both are separate subscriptions, bought from the vendor
- ✓ Bad data does not improve on the way into a dashboard
A report tells you what happened. What to buy next is a different question, and Cin7 Core answers a fair amount of it before any tool is added. Forecasting and planning
The tool follows the question, not the other way round.
These are not competitors with a winner. They answer different questions, and the quickest way to the right one is to say out loud what you want to happen after the number appears on the screen.
Easy Insight, when nothing needs to change
Model the data properly, join Cin7 Core to your channels and your ledger, calculate what the built-in reports cannot, and put it in front of people on a schedule or behind a login. Read-only against Cin7 Core, so there is no route by which a dashboard damages an order.
Wink Toolbox, when the answer has to do something
A warehouse of its own over several systems, a query layer on top, and automations that write back out to them. It also models a group as a tree of organisations, which is how one report covers every entity you run rather than one report per entity.
One thing happening when another thing does
If the requirement is an email when an order is authorised, or a record created in another app when one is created here, that is a workflow rather than a reporting project. Cin7 Core does a lot of it in its own Automation module, and Zapier covers most of the rest.
Easy Insight, in more detail.
It pulls most of the Cin7 Core data model into reportable folders and generates a starting dashboard you then edit: sales and margin, product velocity and days of stock, customer lifetime value, supplier performance, fulfilment, production. Its contribution-margin reporting allocates COGS, channel fees, shipping, discounts and returns to reach a per-order and per-SKU profit figure, though that only completes once the channel, shipping and ledger sources are connected as well. On Cin7 Core alone it stops at COGS.
Beyond dashboards, three things earn it a place. It can load your pre-Cin7 sales history from a spreadsheet, so trend and lifetime reports reach back past go-live. It can cross-check Cin7 Core against your channels and your ledger, which is how you find the orders that never arrived. And it can federate several Cin7 Core accounts into one view, with per-user personas deciding who sees which slice once the dashboard is scheduled out or embedded somewhere.
The boundary is firm and worth repeating: against Cin7 Core it reads and reports, and does not edit live records. Its one write path is the migration tooling used when a business is moving onto Cin7 Core in the first place, which is a different job on a different day.
- ✓ Custom fields, joins and a scripting layer for calculations
- ✓ Contribution margin per order and per SKU
- ✓ Historical sales loaded from before go-live
- ✓ Validation against your channels and your ledger
- ✓ Several Cin7 Core accounts federated into one view
- ✓ Scheduled emails, embedding, and per-persona data access
- ✓ One report across a parent and every entity beneath it
- ✓ Permissions inherited down the tree, so a branch sees only itself
- ✓ Automations that create, update and notify across systems
- ✓ Small internal tools and forms, generated rather than coded
- ✓ Supplier invoices read by AI, with the doubtful ones sent to a person
- ✓ Every action risk-rated, whitelisted and logged
Wink Toolbox, in more detail.
It syncs the systems you run into a warehouse of its own, gives you a read-only query layer and dashboards over the lot, and then adds the half Easy Insight deliberately does not have: automations that write back out. That is the whole distinction. If the requirement ends with a record being created, a status being changed or a purchase order being raised, this is the side of the page you are on. It was called Wink Reports until fairly recently, which is worth knowing if you meet the old name somewhere.
The capability we would flag hardest is the group structure. Entities are arranged as a tree, and the same report or automation runs across the whole subtree with one toggle, so a franchise, a multi-region operator or a business with three trading companies gets one consolidated view without forcing every entity onto identical software. Cin7 Core cannot do that, and neither can most of the systems sitting beside it, because they are each built around a single organisation.
Two more worth knowing. It can generate small internal tools, an order-entry screen or a form for the warehouse, running inside the platform rather than as an application somebody has to host and patch. And its document processing reads inbound supplier invoices, scores its own confidence and routes the doubtful ones to a person before anything is written. Anything able to act is governed: each action carries a risk level, and an agent can only call the actions a human has whitelisted for it.
We work out which of these you actually need.
Usually by trying the cheapest answer first. A saved layout costs nothing, a workflow costs a little, and a reporting platform is a subscription and a project, so it is worth being sure that is the one you need.
What decision is the number for
Who looks at it, how often, and what changes as a result. A number nobody acts on does not need a platform behind it, and a decision made weekly does not need a live feed. This is where most of the shortlist disappears.
Try the built-in report properly
The right report, the right layout, the right prefilter, saved and shared with the people who need it. Where scheduling or an alert closes the gap, that is an Automation module conversation rather than a new vendor.
Stand the layer up, then hand it over
Where a platform is genuinely the answer, we scope it, connect it, agree the definitions behind each figure and build the first reports with you. Then we teach your team to change them, because a dashboard only we can edit is a dependency you did not ask for.
What we are not.
We are not a reseller for either platform. We take no commission on them and hold no partner target, and you will notice there is no pricing anywhere on this page: those figures move, they depend on how you buy, and they are the vendor’s to state rather than ours to guess at. You buy the subscription directly, and if the honest answer is that you need neither, that is the answer you get.
We are not your accountant. When a report and the ledger disagree, we can usually say which system produced which figure and why the two are calculated differently, and that is a genuinely useful thing to know. What those numbers mean, how they should be treated and which of them is right for your accounts is a question for whoever signs off your books. Our accounting page sets that boundary out properly.
And we are not a development shop. If what you need is a small internal tool, we would rather build it inside a platform somebody else hosts, patches and secures than hand you a bespoke application whose only maintainer is us. Where a requirement genuinely needs custom code, we would say so and point you at a developer rather than quietly become one.
What people ask before starting.
How do we know we have outgrown the built-in reports?
Three symptoms, and any one of them is usually enough. The figure you want needs data Cin7 Core does not hold. The figure you want needs two entities added together. Or somebody rebuilds the same export in a spreadsheet every week because the report gets them most of the way and not all of it.
What is not a symptom is being unable to find the report. That one is worth half an hour with somebody who knows the list before it becomes a project.
Easy Insight or Wink Toolbox?
Ask what happens after the number appears. If somebody reads it and decides something, that is a reporting question and Easy Insight is built for it, with deeper data modelling and a stronger story around embedding dashboards and scoping who sees what.
If something then has to happen in another system, or the report has to cover several entities at once, that is Wink Toolbox. It reads and writes back, and the group roll-up is a capability nothing else on this page has.
What does it cost?
Both are separate subscriptions bought from the vendor, and we would not quote either. Pricing changes, it depends on how many people and how many connections you need, and we have no commercial interest in which you choose. Ask them directly and get it in writing before you plan around it.
Our own work is £99 an hour, quoted as estimates by phase rather than as a fixed scope. A reporting piece is usually short unless the underlying data needs tidying first, which is the part we would want to look at before giving you a range.
We just want an email when something happens. Is that a reporting project?
No, and it would be an expensive way to buy one. Cin7 Core’s Automation module handles a good deal of this on its own: workflows that fire on sale and purchase events, conditions on the fields, and notifications sent internally, by email, or as a call out to another system.
Where the other end is an app Cin7 Core does not reach, Zapier usually closes the gap. Both are far smaller commitments than a reporting platform, and we would try them first.
We run several companies. Can we see them together?
Not in Cin7 Core itself, which works one organisation at a time. Both platforms have an answer: Easy Insight can federate several Cin7 Core accounts into one reporting view, and Wink Toolbox models the group as a tree of organisations and runs the same report across the whole of it, with head office seeing everything and each entity seeing only itself.
Which suits you depends on whether the entities need acting on as well as reporting on, and on whether they all run the same systems underneath. That is worth an hour of scoping rather than a guess.
Will a dashboard fix our numbers?
It should show them to you faster, which is not the same thing. If costs were never landed properly, or products were categorised three different ways by three different people, a reporting layer reproduces all of that with better typography.
We would rather say that up front than take the work and hand you a beautiful chart of the wrong figure. Where that is the situation, a system audit is usually the cheaper start.
What we have written about the operation and the connections around it.
Tell us the number you cannot get to.
Bring the report you keep rebuilding in a spreadsheet. Book a call and we will tell you whether Cin7 Core already answers it, whether a workflow closes the gap, or whether this is genuinely a job for a platform on top.
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What to expect
- ✓ A straight conversation, no scripted sales pitch
- ✓ The built-in answer first, where there is one
- ✓ Estimates by phase before you commit to anything
- ✓ No commission on either platform, and no opinion we are paid to hold