Are you looking to improve your financial reporting? The following are two examples of tools we recommend to our customers, enabling them to produce great looking and accurate reporting from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Astral Reports
Astral reports have been designed from the ground up to be used by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central customers. It has been built to extract data from business central accurately. It’s an excel based reporting tool that enables you to report against any table and any field, including custom fields.
We have found Astral reports to be very user friendly as if you know how to use excel. Then you can use 98% of the functionality straight away without any training. Also, Astral reports come with several pre-built reports with over 170 predefined functions.
The functions have been designed with management in mind, whether you are a Finance Director, Management Accountant, Department Manager or MD. The reports have a powerful user interface enabling you to build graphically rich, glossy reports which can be updated at the click of a button.
The real strength of the tool is to enable high-level reports such as balance sheet, profit & loss or management reports.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a cloud-based solution with a desktop interface. Power BI integrates nicely with business central. This does, however, require some technical knowledge and expertise to integrate the two. Reports will need to be built for you unless you have the necessary skill sets internally. Once staff have been trained on the system users have access to a suite of tools for aggregating, analysing, visualising and sharing data. The intuitive user interface, particularly for users familiar with Excel makes this an easy tool to use. This, combined with its deep integration with other Microsoft products, makes it a very versatile self-service tool that requires little upfront training.
Gartner recognises Microsoft as a leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligent Platforms for the 13th consecutive year.
The above video is an excellent example of how this tool can be used to make informed decisions based on data and insights.
