Are you currently using Business Central in your business and are not sure how to maximise your use of it? Don’t worry as in our latest blog article, we provide you with 3 tips to enable you to better use your Business Central solution.
1) Filters – How do you use them?
This particular feature of Business Central often goes unnoticed but can be extremely powerful if used correctly. If you can gain a firm understanding of filtering, you can maximise your use of your financial data across your business.
To get started simply login to your Business Central solution then go to your Chart of Accounts page, you will find that the filter button enables you to easily delve deeper into your data.
To put this into context in the form of an example, so instead of exporting a trial balance to Excel just to gain a Balance Sheet, you can replace this by using filters. Simply filter the income/balance column by ‘Balance Sheet’, after this filter by ‘Account Type’ by posting Accounts only or even go as far as giving it a dimensions code to get a balance sheet shown by cost centre. This can be easily achieved within your Business Central solution without the need to mess around with any data. If you do need to take it over to Excel, you are able to take your filtered data over to enable you to carry out any other forms of analysis that you may need to complete.
As well as the above, another powerful part of Business Central is the fact that you can easily filter by multiple fields in addition to adding ‘filter totals by’ which gives you the power to filter numerical data that is being pulled through.
Taking this one step further in Business Central, you can easily save and name your filtered view to enable you to access them easily at a later date. You will notice that any saved filtered views can be found on the left-hand menu on your Business Central Chart of Account page.
2) Analysis Views – how do you use them?
You will know that Account Schedules can easily analyse data from within your General Ledger accounts and help to build your core business performance reports. As well as this, you are able to use Analysis View within Account Schedules to build templates and create your own reports. From this, you will be able to filter up to 4 dimensions and allow you to use them to create reports.
In order to do this, select ‘Show Matrix’ to see your filtered data and from here you will be able to select individual values to dive deeper into your data. You will notice that the matrix view enables you to edit dimensions to look at other reports which you will be able to export into Excel.
It is important to note that when using the analysis view section, you will see that it has a ‘last entry number’ set so if you are looking to use the latest data for the analysis view, you will need to get the report to include recent posts or simple enable the ‘update on posting’ feature. The auto update feature may result in slightly slower reports but will include all the data you need.
3) Reporting functionality in Business Central – how do you use it?
In order to take advantage of the pre-defined reports in Business Central, you simply select ‘Report’ which you will find in the header row within the Chart of Accounts view. If you are looking for a specific report you can use the search bar.
It is important to note that when you go to run a report in Business Central, a pop-up window will appear allowing you to select the layout, filters and other options for the report. At this point, it is worthwhile you taking the time to check out all the options available so you can keep re-running these reports until you are 100% happy with them.
Once you have completed the above action, you can easily export it into several different document formats. The best one to use is a pdf as if you are looking to export to Excel you will need to make sure that it formats correctly. You will find that there are a number of third party reporting extension tools on the market that can enable you to extract data in Excel. If you want to find out which ones, Advantage have available please just give us a call.
If you have a specific report that you run on a regular basis, you can set up report schedules. As well as this, you can also bookmark these reports – you will find them in your role centre as well as on your Business Central home screen. Better still, you can access a report inbox in your Business Central role centre to check out the reports you have run.
Next Steps?
If you are looking to take advantage of some of the above tips but don’t know how and would like some dedicated Business Central consultancy or specific Business Central support then please talk to our Business Central experts now to discuss it.
Want to receive Business Central specific tips like the above straight in your inbox? Sign up to our mailing list today.
