World-class decisions with BI360 Reporting for Dynamics 365 Business Central

The excitement for Dynamics 365 Business Central is growing, and organizations will need a CPM tool to achieve Reporting and Budgeting that enables world-class decision-making

Making world-class decisions is imperative for any organization to succeed, and the ability to do it quickly and efficiently gives a competitive advantage. This also includes the ability to quickly use new solutions, such as Dynamics 365 Business Central. Achieving quick results when implementing or making changes to a system provides confidence among the team, provides momentum for future tasks, and generates excitement. The excitement for Dynamics 365 Business Central is growing, and there will be many implementations over the next few years. Additionally, organizations will need a CPM tool to achieve Reporting and Budgeting that enables world-class decision-making.

Enabling world-class decision-making involves many areas for organizations. The first is to ensure that all employees have access to the data that meets their needs. Employees in finance and accounting need general-ledger and sub-ledger data while a warehouse manager requires inventory data and an executive needs specific key performance indicators (KPIs) across the organization. Secondly, the data presented should be easy to access, quick to view, and highlight areas of impact. Providing reams of data will not allow an employee to make quick and accurate decisions, but it will if the data is provided in a way that emphasizes the information that affects their decisions. Third, it is imperative to be able to access the detail data in a clear and concise way from Dynamics 365 Business Central. This allows the employee to research information quickly and effectively to determine issues, research questions, and make sound business decisions.

The question that may arise is, how do we do this effectively and efficiently? Effective reporting has standard reports that are mandatory for all businesses, such as Income Statements, Cash Flows, Balance Sheets, and similar financial statements. The second part of effective reporting is to have reports that provide KPIs, Benchmarks, or other similar decision-making metrics. The KPI reporting takes longer if this is not currently a concentration in the organization, as this requires interviews, data analysis, and mocking up examples.

However, the ability to rapidly implement and create the key financial and operational reports for Dynamics 365 Business Central is critical for all organizations. A separate CPM reporting product will provide many additional features that ERPs do not have, such as having a separate reporting data warehouse, which allows for easier slicing and dicing of data for reporting analysis. It also allows combining data from multiple data sources to do combined reporting and analysis.

At Solver with BI360, in as little as one hour, we are able to implement a starting package of reports and budget input templates in the cloud, from Dynamics 365 Business Central. We call this BI360 Cloud QuickStart. By bringing the data and General Ledger dimensions into the data warehouse through a connector and using an automation tool to set up the hierarchies for the Income Statements and the Balance Sheet, you can have data quickly ready for reporting and analysis. With the ability to import data trees into the BI360 Cloud, the forms and reports are able to run quickly. Your forms and reports are ready to distribute across the organization with minimal cosmetic changes, such as adding the company name, company logo, etc.

BI360 Cloud QuickStart comes with a Budget input template, a Forecast input template, Balance Sheet, Income Statement Trending, Income Statement Variance, Trial Balance, and a KPI report that has graphs for Cash, Accounts Receivable, and many margins, such as net income margin comparing actual to budget.

By implementing QuickStart or similar solutions, a company can be up and running with Reporting for Dynamics 365 Business Central very quickly. This rapid implementation provides a quick win and shows the power of implementing a CPM tool. By getting a quick return on investment, you can set the stage for doing additional implementation throughout your company and gain the full power of a CPM tool like BI360.

Original Article located here: https://www.solverglobal.com/blog/2018/05/world-class-decisions-with-bi360-reporting-for-dynamics-365-business-central/