Is your business suffering from insufficient reporting and what steps can you take to resolve it in Dynamics NAV/Business Central?

It goes without saying that the ability to accurately report on how a business is performing along with any future trends has become more and more challenging and complex. Nowadays, director level executives are expected to be able to predict customer trends, market & economic changes, managing customer expectations, dealing with any innovations in technology as well as the vast amounts of data at their disposal. Furthermore, as part of their role, they need to ensure governance of their business along with regulatory compliance and increase business growth with appropriately skilled staff. 

To demonstrate some of the challenges that board level executives face a recent study conducted by Deloitte highlighted the following: 

• 35% of respondents believe that their current finance technology does not support their management reporting requirements. 
• 53% of respondents feel their data quality is a problem in their organisation. 
• 52% of Finance Business Partners spend the majority of their time creating and updating reports. 

So, what happens when it comes to finance reporting? 

As many of us already know, CFOs are required to provide monthly and annual financial reports (‘the heartbeat’) to the key stakeholders in their business. The monitoring of the company’s heartbeat is very time consuming therefore requires careful planning. Furthermore, determination is required of the people that will be reviewing the reports, in what format they need to be in and whether or not they need to drill down to underlying data.  In addition to this, a fundamental part of reporting is to make that sure that the necessary Finance ERP systems such as Dynamics NAV/Business Central & IT systems are in place to allow continuous, dynamic reporting to be generated. This helps to ensure that the month end or yearend pressures and potential errors are avoided. 

To give you an example of how Advantage has helped to resolve the reporting challenges outlined above. 

AA Drive Tech who are a NAV client of Advantage, spent 2-3 days every month generating their monthly management reporting pack, which is extremely time consuming and labour intensive. To help them with this, Advantage worked with them to provide a ‘one click’ solution that will help to drive core data from their Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution. 

So, what steps can you take to resolve insufficient reporting in Dynamics NAV / Business Central? 

1) Maximise your use of the built-in reporting functionality within your Dynamics NAV/Business solution 

Within your current Dynamics NAV / Business Central solution you have around 521 core reports already built into your ERP system that you may not know even existed. 

These will allow you to report on a number of different metrics that aren’t necessarily finance related which can be delivered in the form of KPIs / Dashboards within your User Interface or through the ever-reliable Microsoft Excel.