MR 2012 Expected Release Date & Functionality

MR 2012 (previously referred to as MR2 FP2) is currently scheduled to be released in the late March/early April 2012 time frame. 

MR 2012's new functionality centers around the theme of 'distribution' and is expected to offer the following:

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV integration
• A richer report viewing experience, including:
• Drill back to Dynamics ERP
• Show accounts without dimension codes on reports
• Comments
• Instant Messenger integration
• Report output flexibility, including:
• Export to XPS
• MS SharePoint integration with alerts (There is not expected to be an MR Viewer for MS SharePoint, but rather a listing of reports that will launch the MR Viewer and view the report from the secure MR Report Library.)
• Report Scheduling (Note that command link scheduling is available now)

A listing of MR versions and release dates can be found here.

Prophix CPM

Prophix CPM is a fully integrated performance management solution that empowers organizations with budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, consolidations and personnel planning capabilities.  
 

Prophix CPM’s robust analysis functionality empowers end-user investigation with ad-hoc ‘drag and drop’ capabilities, automatic variance calculations and full drill-down to details on measures within the business model.

Prophix CPM has the ability to combine financial and operational business models, meaning that you can leverage Prophix to manage performance across your entire organization and roll these operation budgets into your financial model.  An example would be to create a project/job costing model that facilitates budgeting project costs at the operational level.  This model would then facilitate budget to actual reporting for projects and automatically update the financial budget/forecast when changes are made to any project’s budget/forecast.

Prophix CPM facilitates the automation and scheduling of administrative functions, from importing actual data to distributing Excel templates for end user contribution to distributing financial reports via email or Microsoft SharePoint.

Prophix CPM is ERP agnostic meaning that it can be used with any ERP system including any Microsoft Dynamics ERP.  It also fully integrates with TARGIT BI.

For more information contact me and/or view the Prophix CPM Product Tour.

MR Translations - FRx vs MR

Management Reporter's financial translations feature is completely different from FRx's functionality, which is a welcome improvement!

The highlights of FRx's functionality was that you had to:

1. Re-enter your average, spot and historical rates in FRx's DAX tables (since it couldn't pull this information from your Dynamics ERP), and
2. Have a number of settings correct in FRx (i.e. company currency, report catalogue translations feature, translations activated in the column and the column syntax correct). 

The beauty of the translations feature in MR is that it leverages the Dynamics ERP exchange rate information.  In Dynamics GP, it specifically references a default exchange table.  So, in most cases, a client can have two exchange tables (i.e. monthly average, and spot/historical) used for multiple purposes including: calculating exchange at time of transaction, revaluing foreign currency transactions and financial translations. Next, you have to set the translation setting for each account in your ERP.

Once this is complete, there is only one step to perform in Management Reporter to produce a translated financial statement, namely, ensure that you have a column with the Currency Source set to the translated currency.  In the sample below, the functional currency is USD and the translated currency is CAD:



MR Column Translating USD to CAD

This is what the final report looks like:

Sample MR Translated Report

I must say, this functionality is a great improvement and much more efficient than what was provided in FRx.  Enjoy!