Now that Dynamics 365 Financials has been out for a few months, partners and customers alike have had the chance to experiment with it, test its limits, and run it through its paces. When it comes to seeing the program for the first time, one of the questions that I often hear is, “What kind of reporting capability does it have?” With that in mind, I wanted to touch on the reporting options available for Dynamics 365.
Partially because it’s such a new software, the program itself, as well as the add-ons that go with it, are still being fleshed out. That being said, as of today there are essentially three different options available for someone looking at an implementation of Dynamics 365 for Financials.
- Default reports in Dynamics 365
The standard reports that come with Dynamics 365 for Financials give you the basic information you would expect from an out-of-the-box ERP system. You can access a Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Statement of Cash Flows, Statement of Retained Earnings, and Sales Tax Collected directly from the Actions pane on the home page. The other standard reports you would expect (Customer Statement, Trial Balance, etc) are also available in the Purchasing, Inventory and Sales modules. You can print these reports to PDF, Word or Excel with a few clicks. You can perform certain limited modifications, although at this point no Report Writer exists for D365 Financials. Luckily, Microsoft has given us a few examples of how to get started with modifying the default reports.
- Power BI Reports
Power BI is a business intelligence reporting suite that allows users to access charts, KPIs and important business metrics from a variety of platforms utilizing data from widely disparate systems. If you’ve used the program before, you know how powerful (no pun intended) it can be in getting you the data you need in a clean, easy-to-read format. Power BI comes with a content pack for Dynamics 365 Financials, which is essentially a series of pre-built reports that minimize the pain during initial setup. You can also add a report(s) directly to your home page on D365 Financials. Power BI also integrates with Cortana AI to give you some neat functionality around natural language recognition – for instance, you can search a term such as “cost of goods sold by month as bar chart” and the system will pull up a bar chart of that data without any further action necessary.
Here’s a quick article Microsoft put together on setting up D365 Financials with Power BI.
- Jet Reports for Dynamics 365
If you’ve used Management Reporter with any of your previous Microsoft Dynamics implementations, you’ve no doubt heard that MR is in the process of being sunsetted by Microsoft. The replacement for Management Reporter is Jet Express, a slimmed-down but fully functional offering from Jet Reports. They also have Jet Professional and Jet Enterprise, each offering further features and deeper functionality. The neat thing about Jet Reports is that the product is run as an add-on for Microsoft Excel, meaning that all of the data manipulation and report building begins in Excel, rather than taking place elsewhere and then being printed to an Excel-compatible file. Jet Reports also has a very active support team that frequently updates their website with new videos and articles about their product. While Jet Express for Dynamics 365 has not yet been released, they expect to release to general availability before the end of the year. I am including a link to their home page where you can browse how-tos, ask a question, and watch intro videos on how the product works.
If you’d like to discuss how Dynamics 365 for Financials could be a good fit for your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact me – my email is [email url=”jnorberg@ktlsolutions.com” class=””]jnorberg@ktlsolutions.com[/email].
JOHN NORBERG | Business Software Consultant
After working a variety of jobs through college, from dishwasher at an Italian café to gravedigger and caretaker at a cemetery, John graduated from North Dakota State University and Minnesota State Community Technical College with degrees in Philosophy and Information Technology. In 2014, John began working as a Support Engineer at Microsoft in Fargo, ND, the birthplace of Dynamics GP. He discovered a passion for delivering excellent customer service, and he often lead the team in cases resolved and positive feedback. After two years working Technical Support for GP, John accepted a position at KTL Solutions as a Business Software consultant. Unlike his previous position which had afforded few personal meetings, the deep interaction with clients at KTL Solutions has allowed John to identify and analyze their problems, leading to the implementation of solutions suited to their individual needs.
