Dynamics GP Reporting Options & Alternatives

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.

Count Down to Jet Express for Microsoft Dynamics GP!

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!

Keeping your Planning Focus

Do you or your organization suffer from a lack of focus during your planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting exercises?

The other day, while I was watching my five year old son's indoor soccer game I noticed that I was following the action in the wrong game?  Why?  The reason is simple enough, my son was playing a field over and the spectator stands are only available on one side of the field, which meant that I had to keep my focus on the second field instead of the game being played right in front of me!

I believe that our planning and reporting can suffer the same 'lack of focus'.  It can occur for a few reasons, including:

• Spending more time collecting and organizing data than analysing the data
• Budgeting/forecasting at an inappropriate level of detail, effectively drawing our focus from key business drivers that should receive more relative focus and giving equal weight to administrative expenses
• Routinely generating, reviewing and analyzing a standard set of reports, as opposed to interacting with the data and performing 'ad-hoc analysis' on key areas and variances

New Features in MR 2012!

Management Reporter (MR) 2012 is chaulk full of new features, many of which in line with the 'distribution theme' of this release.

Here is a partial listing:

• MR 2012 now integrates with all Dynamics ERPs (i.e. NAV has been added)
• Drill-back to Dynamics ERP
• Comments
• Multiple-destination distribution flexibility
• SharePoint integration
• Scheduling
• Missing Account Analysis

What I find spectacular is that Microsoft has delivered on all the enhancements it promised last year that I blogged about here.

For more information, please visit the official Microsoft Dynamics CPM blog where they are show casing new features each week.  In many cases, MS has included a link to a YouTube MR 2012 demo! 

The Results of Combining Operational Models with Financial Budgets

This is the final blog entry in a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts. Click here to review part 2 or part 1 respectively.

Combining operational models that link key business drivers with your financial budgets provide the following results:

• Significantly shorter budget/forecast cycles
• Facilitates market environment vs. calendar driven re-forecasting to react to quickly to changes
• Re-aligns financial planning focus
• Facilitates insight between operational tactics and the financial forecast
• Facilitates variance analysis at the operational and key driver level
• Shifts professional resource time from collecting data and maintaining spreadsheets to analysis and decision making

Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

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!

Dilbert and Why to Not Budget using Excel

For many smaller organizations with simple budgeting/forecasting needs, Excel works just fine.  However, as Dilbert points out below, there are certainly drawbacks to using Excel:

Source: http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-06-02

For organizations with more complicating needs, the value of a using a dedicated CPM solution for budgeting/forecasting and financial/management reporting are myriad, including:
- Simplify and better control the budgeting process
- Reduced administration of the budgeting cycle
- Increased collaboration
- Real time version control
- Mitigate speadsheet ‘mis-calculations’ and ‘overrides’
- Better manage security
- Historical tracking/audit of changes
- Integrated financial/management reporting solution to facilitate variance reporting
- Simply reforecasting administration

SmartView for Dynamics GP

When it comes to how to get your information out of Microsoft Dynamics GP, there are so many alternatives!

One distinction that I formally made between SmartLists (whether the out-of-the-box SmartLists or the custom SmartList Builder lists) and Reports (whether SRS Reports or Crystal Reports) is that reports typically have grouping and totalling of data to facilitate analysis and decision making.  Well, that distinction between 'lists' and 'reports' has been blown away with the introduction of SmartView for Dynamics GP!  This is a 'must-see' and 'must-have' tool for any and all GP users.

SmartView is like GP’s SmartLists; however, it is a whole lot better! SmartView is a fast, flexible and easy to use Excel-like tool for analysis that works with all existing SmartLists, including those built using SmartList Builder.

SmartView features include:
• Faster retrieval of data than the SmartLists they are based on.


• Unlimited & Advanced Filters to isolate just the data that you want to see.


• Grouping & Subtotals to dynamically group your data by dragging and dropping.

The Evolution of SmartLists to SmartListBuider to SmartView looks something like this:

Click here to watch a SmartView demo: SmartView Demo  (Make sure you select the Windows Media File version.)

For more information on SmartView for Dynamics GP contact your partner.

Management Reporter: 7 Reasons to Upgrade

This blog is the condensed material to be presented in a webinar tomorrow:

• Familiar User Interface (MR is both like MS Office and FRx)
• Simplified Reporting Tools (i.e. Undo, Associations, Hide/Unhide, Exporting/Importing Selected Building Blocks, etc..)
• Powerful Analysis & Personalization Capabilities (Logos, Custom Page Numbering, Custom Page Breaks, Complex Filtering, etc...)
• Superior Performance & Security (SQL based solution, Enhanced Security, Server-side processing, Supports 64 bit, Windows Authentication, etc...)
• Migrating from FRx to MR is Easy! (Well.. for the most part!)
• MR is the Future! (MS has made a significant investment in MR as the CPM platform for Dynamics GP)
• You Want to! (MR is only compatible with GP2010 and higher.  FRx SP11 is also compatible with GP2010.)

Migrating to Management Reporter (MR) from FRx when Upgrading to GP2010

Most of FRx’s core functionality is already built into Management Reporter (MR), including multi-company consolidation, multi-currency and AA integration. As such, many organizations using FRx could migrate to MR today along with GP2010 upgrade. 

Note:  Organizations do not have to migrate to MR with a GP2010 upgrade; however, an upgrade to GP2010 is required to use MR.

Having said that, a review of FRx functionality currently being used to ensure there are no surprise functionality gaps that may pose an issue upon migration is a good idea!

While this information is constantly changing, a current snap-shot of functionality gaps is outlined below:



'Not Yet' in MR:

Feature Pack 1 (FP/SP1), which is scheduled for fall 2010, is expected to have the following functionality:


• Translations (based off GP translations enhancement which is not yet in GP2010)


• Forecaster integration that will be more advanced that FRx’s

Feature Pack 2 (FP/SP2) which has a 'distribution' theme, scheduled for spring/summer 2011, is expected to have the following functionality:


• Sharepoint integration


• Email


• Drill down to GP (inquiry screen and possibly SRS reports)

'Not Currently Planned' for MR:

I believe the only ‘real’ deal breaker here is ‘row linking’ which is used in a small percentage of advanced FRx design environments.  However, a few other items, such as 'report manager' and 'effective dates' are also currently not planned to be incorporated into MR.  That may be somewhat misleading though, as MR may incorporate different more advanced functionality that would handle the same type of situations and much more.

 'Different' or 'Improved' in MR:



Many features in MR are improved or different.  A few of these items are listed below:


• Translations (SP1)


• Forecaster integration (SP1)


• No Webport – Report Library (Current) or Sharepoint (SP2)


This is not a complete list.  I hope to blog about these features in the future, so stay tuned!

Introducing Management Reporter

Management Reporter (MR) is Microsoft's Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platform for its Dynamics ERP solutions. It has been available for Dynamics GP2010 for about a month (See Microsoft's official Press Release).

CPM is a Business Intelligence (BI) capability area covering:

• financial reporting,
• consolidations,
• planning,
• budgeting and
• forecasting

In short, MR is FRx on steroids! In fact, MR is much more than that. It is more than a new graphical user interface, the entire product has been rebuilt from the back end (how it accesses data) to the front end (the user interface). It is the foundation upon which the future of Microsoft's CPM solutions will be built and that is very exciting!
MR effectively replaces FRx for users on Dynamics GP2010 and above. However, some advanced FRx reporting design capabilities are slated to be delivered in the fall of 2010, so not every FRx installation can migrate to MR today. Remember, patience is a virtue!
If you're worried about migrating from FRx to MR, don't be, because Microsoft has built a migration path/tool. Of course, each situation is unique and some manual updating of reports may be requried in some circumstances.
In case you are wondering, MR is currently slated to encompass the planning, budgeting and forecasting capabilties of Microsoft Forecaster by 2011, thus effectively replacing that product as well. As with FRx, a migration path will be available. So, your current investment is safe!
A final word of praise for FRx... FRx has been the industry leading financial reporting package for nearly 20 years. I think we all agree that it is a great product, but it is based on old technology and I think we can also agree that it needs more than just a facelift to carry it into the future. That, together with Microsoft's vision to build the industry leading CPM solution on a common platform, is essentially the raison d'être for Management Reporter.
Warning: Management Reporter may cause financial report designers to renew their excitement for creating financial reports.