Companies that want to provide optimum services to clients in the most cost-effective manner are turning to data mining tools and software systems to achieve these goals. These systems allow firms to look deeper into their financial data and view figures and reports that could not be seen with previous database applications. In the past, only larger companies were able to take advantage of expensive data mining tools that ran off of data warehouse and database systems and extracted information from multiple data sources to provide a single coherent view. Nowadays an increasing number of small and midsized companies can afford these high-powered analytical tools, due to reductions in price. A number of these database systems that were proprietary in the past have made the move toward open source systems, which utilize a server such as Crystal Reports Server XI or SQL, and allows for easier integration with other providers' software. Many data mining systems have built on Microsoft's SQL Server to ease the integration of their applications to other companies' time and billing and practice management software applications. A feature that many firms find useful in data mining tools is the dashboard or scorecard. Because these features offer graphical representations of a company's financial data, business executives and CPAs can exercise their decision-making without having to search through spreadsheets or open up reports.