One of the previous tag-lines for Microsoft Dynamics was 'it works the way you do' and when it comes to reporting, that pretty well sums up the Microsoft Dynamics GP offering in a nutshell.
There are a lot of options for reporting!
Sometimes the options themselves can be confusing; however, remember that each reporting tool has its pros/cons and 'sweet spots' as my recent client exercise below shows:
In some cases, third-party reporting and/or planning tools such as those identified and circled make sense and drive the most value for an organization's needs.
If you 100% of your planning and reporting needs for Microsoft Dynamics ERP are not being met, tell me about it below and lets see how I can help.
I love Dilbert and I especially love Dilbert on anything related to budgeting, reporting, analytics or business intelligence.
In many organizations, a certain aura of 'mystery' surrounds how the annual budget is prepared in Excel. In some cases, those preparing it cannot even articulate it very well. This 'mystery' is another risk for those organizations that do not invest in a CPM platform and 'de-mystefying' the planning process.
Let's face it - most companies use Microsoft Excel to either fully prepare their budgets and forecasts, or at least to aid in some portion of this process.
There are numerous reasons for this, including the following:
- Excel is already installed
- Business users already know how to use Excel
- Business users like (or should I say love) Excel
- The organizations' ERP system allows one to import a budget from Excel
But when an organization's level of sophistication grows, using Excel can become an inefficient and complex tool to prepare budgets and forecasts for business users. But, how can organizations identify this tipping point? The following questions may assist you:
- Business users are reluctant to re-forecast due to complexity and amount of effort required
- Business users are expected to learn and leverage Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Excel to keep up with organizational complexity or business users begin to lose control of their financial and operational models as internal IT or external consultants develop and maintain complex VBA code
- Business users like (or should I say love) for Excel begins to diminish as they spend more and more time populating data and fixing errors in the spreadsheets
- Other planning and performance management areas, including financial and operational reporting systems bundled with the organization's ERP system no longer meet the growing complexity of organizational requirements
What are your thoughts on this topic?
Good news for Forecaster 7 users who have been patiently waiting for the re-release of Forecaster 7 SP4 to rectify a number of nasty issues - Service Pack 5 is on its way!
At present, I do not have the expected release date, but it is good news nonetheless!
For those who don't want to wait, you can always look at alternate budgeting & reporting solutions, such as, Prophix CPM which allows you to link operational and financial budgets to drive real value from the planning and performance management process.
For those who are not in a rush, why not wait until budgeting can be performed in Management Reporter?
Jet Express is the latest in the full selection of friendly, easy to use reporting and analytics tools available from Jet Reports. It is a free Excel based reporting tool that will be made available for Dynamics GP at Convergence 2013 in mid-March 2013.
Let the count-down begin!
