Insight into the business and the ability to make the right decisions at the right time, quickly and efficiently, is extremely important for any company that wants to be a leader in the market in which it operates. This insight is only possible with an inferable business management solution that is at the forefront of the latest technology.
Data analysis and reporting
Reporting and analytics involve many business areas across the company and it is important to ensure that all relevant employees have access to the data they need. Finance and accounting officers, for example, need accounting data from the general ledger, a warehouse manager, on the other hand, will have to use warehouse-related data, while the company's director must use specific information from data regarding the company's effort and performance goals, also called KPIs, which provide information about direction and speed for the fulfillment of the company's strategic objectives.
However, it is important that all data is easily accessible, quick to find and that impacts on important business areas are highlighted. Making data available to relevant employees is not enough on its own, the data streams provided are only useful for the individual employee when it is presented in a way that highlights the information that ultimately influences their decisions.
Data analysis and reporting in Business Central
As a normal part of daily business activities, companies today continuously collect large amounts of data. For the company's decision-makers, this data can have extremely high value and provide information of great importance, which provides insight into the company and its operations. Business Central has built-in functionality and useful tools that let you collect, analyze and share the important data.
Analysis reports
As mentioned, the company's various managers have different needs for which data they must present. For example, warehouse managers must be able to obtain information on stock turnover, analyzes of stock movements and statistics on stock value, whereas sales managers must be able to continuously analyze turnover, gross profit and other key figures on sales results. In Business Central, it is possible to continuously use analysis reports to create user-friendly reports on the basis of entries for booked transactions, for example purchases, sales, inventory adjustments, etc. A customized report can combine, compare and present source information from a product journal in different ways, thereby presenting important and meaningful information.
You also have the option of creating a customized analysis report which focuses exclusively on the company's accounting budget account, or key accounts, within the current month's net revenue, both in allocated amount and quantity, gross profit and gross profit percentage. In this way, you can compare the figures with the results for the previous months or with the same month last year, as well as perform calculations on any deviations. This is done in Business Central in one view. Further down the page, you will be able to find the cause of any problem areas you may have identified and access the information at each individual transaction level.
An analysis report is composed of the objects the user wishes to analyze, for example salesperson or customer, which are represented by the analysis parameters and lines. This means that the way you want to analyze your objects is shown by columns such as periodic comparison of sales amounts and sales volumes, calculation of the profit from the sale of an item (profit), or of the actual and budgeted figures.
Dimensions
When analyzing data in Business Central, the dimension functionality plays a significant role. In short, a dimension consists of data that can be added to a record as a kind of marker, so that records with similar properties can be grouped and easily and quickly retrieved for analysis purposes. Dimensions are used, for example, when you need to create charts of accounts for reporting or define the individual analysis views and are used across the whole of Business Central for entries in drafts, documents and budgets. In each individual dimension you can have an unlimited number of dimension values which are subunits of the individual dimension, for example a dimension called Department can have dimension values such as Administration, Sales etc. as department names. Both dimensions and dimension values are user-defined and unbounded, meaning that
Reporting in Power BI
Both Business Central and Power BI have been developed with integration in mind and therefore it is easy to gain insight into data from Business Central from Power BI. Data is retrieved from Power BI and then a dashboard and reports based on the retrieved data .
The advantage of an integrated Power BI solution for Business Central is that you get better and more advanced reporting functionality. Power BI is a free business intelligence application that simply and quickly allows you to produce credible and convincing reports or obtain data from widely different data sources and create data models that can be shared as reports with your colleagues across the company.
Power BI can be used in the following areas:
