Data Reporting in Business Central: Capture Insights and Make Data-Drive Decisions

Data reporting in Business Central is one of the core capabilities that enables a business to capture useful information from large amounts of data. Once a business has adequate data on a certain process, it can make actionable decisions to enhance the output. Before learning the effectiveness of the reporting in Business Central, let’s understand why it is important for a small business.

Why is Data Reporting Essential in Business?

On a daily basis, a business has to deal with diverse sets of data on different levels of hierarchy, and everyone must get the required information on time. It enables the concerned authority to make the right decision at the right time for getting favourable results.

Data reporting is the functionality that is involved in all sections or departments of a business to empower employees with the right set of information. Like, for financial reporting in Business Central ERP, the finance department requires the data of all accounts and financial transactions to keep track of all expenses or profits in real-time. Also, the inventory management team requires complete data on stocks and its different aspects, which include inventory, overstocking, and stockout.

Even, the higher management, like CFOs, CMOs, or CEOs, requires data on different operations, their performance, and the possible gaps for improvements so that they can make data-driven decisions. All such data must be readily available in the form of reports so that the end user can easily consume such large amounts of data with ease.

Here comes the seamless reporting capability in Dynamics 365 Business Central that is efficient and capable enough to generate customised reports of different operations within minutes. You can easily connect various data connectors with Business Central and build centralised reports, which are insanely valuable to higher authorities or the decision makers.

How to Use Reports?

Reports are very useful when it comes to leveraging valuable insights and making a decision that drives augmented growth. In layman’s terms, it lets make the data work for you. Once you have the data in the form of reports, you can structure it to make the information useful as per your needs.

Like, if you have a list of invoices, you can create a report of all customers who are giving recurring business so that you can make tailor-made services or offers for them. It can help you retain your valuable customers in the long run. Also, you can create customised reports as per the information you require to drive an action.

For instance, you can create a report of your live inventory data to know the stocks that are going to exhaust soon or not. Also, you can generate a report of your current inventory levels of a particular product, including all versions or classifications.

Creating a Report in Business Central

The process to create a report in Business Central is easy, and you need to follow a few steps to generate it. These steps are discussed below:

• You need to choose a particular operation or a process of which you want to build a report.
• After selecting the operation, you can proceed to design the dataset.
• A dataset is the set of information that you can collect from a Business Central database to build a report.
• After collecting the data or creating the dataset, you can proceed to design the interface of the report.
• In general, there are three types of report layouts available in Business Central that you can utilise to build reports, which are:
• WRL (word report layout): to build document reports
• ERL (excel report layout): to build analytical reports
• Layout generated using RDL (Report Definition Language) to build any of the reports

Based on the layout to create a report, you can move ahead building it.

Get Advanced Reporting using Power BI

Business Central offers sufficient reporting capabilities for businesses that justifies the requirements for standard operations. However, businesses with complicated processes require advanced data reporting and analytics solutions to meet complex demands. In such a case, you can go with integrating Business Central with Power BI to avail advanced data reporting capabilities.

To integrate Power BI, you need to purchase a Power BI Pro license along with a full-user license of Business Central, whether it is Essentials or Premium.

After the integration, you can directly control Power BI reports from the Business Central dashboard—thanks to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem.

How can Dynamics Square help you with reporting in Business Central?

Dynamics Square offers comprehensive reporting solutions for Business Central. Apart from enhancing the efficiency of existing reports and connecting them with Power BI for sophisticated analysis, they can also create customised reports that are tailored to your specific requirements and provide assistance and guidance. By working together with Dynamics Square, you can benefit from better decision-making, higher output, better data visualisation, and the application of advanced analytics.