Reporting options
finance and operations apps includes many reporting options. The following sections review each of these options.
Native controls
Organizations often have improvised reporting requirements that need to be addressed promptly. For example, a customer might want to know the status of their order, or a sales representative might want to check if sufficient inventory is available to fulfill a customer order.
Native controls, such as the Forms and Inquiries pages, can provide this information. The Forms and Inquiries pages in the solution provide multiple options for you to filter data to find relevant information quickly, and they can also be personalized by users. Because different people and companies have different requirements when they interact with the app, especially in terms of used fields, personalization provides tools that let users and organizations tailor the way that information is ordered and interacted with in the app.
These capabilities are key to providing simplified, optimized experiences in the app that are customized to the user and the organization. You can save multiple personalizations on the same form and then use them based on the business function that a user is performing. The personalized forms can include user-defined filters or sorting criteria, which allows users to quickly return to commonly filtered datasets and share information with a different audience.
For more information, see Personalize finance and operations apps.
Operational workspaces
Operational workspaces provide a one-page overview of the activity that revolves around a business function. Operational workspaces can help users understand the status of the activities, the upcoming workload, and the performance of the process or user. Workspaces can help users navigate the details of an activity, and they can provide charts, views, and list pages, which can help users complete their tasks directly from the workspace. In finance and operations apps, the workspace has become a central location for a user to start their daily activities, and it provides a highly visual, interactive experience for users.
Business documents
Business documents are often used to capture and communicate the details of business transactions. This practice requires a reporting solution that can produce physical manifestations of business data by using existing devices such as network printers. Example applications of business documents include sales invoices, customer statements, and checks.
The characteristics of business documents are:
- Paginated documents that are destined to be printed on paper or distributed by email.
- Heavily dependent on parameters to filter and produce the desired result set.
- Capturing of a customer snapshot and vendor activity that can be archived for future references.
Every business has unique requirements that are related to business documents, and they have traditionally relied on developers to build predefined formats. finance and operations apps now provides business document management, which enables business users to edit business document templates by using Microsoft 365 services or appropriate Microsoft Office desktop applications. Edits to the documents might include changing business document designs and adding placeholders for additional data without source code changes and new deployments.
Watch the following video, for an overview of business documents.
For more information, see Build reports for finance and operations apps.
Financial reporting
Management reporter is integrated within the application as the Financial reporting tool. Financial reporting helps financial and business professionals create, maintain, deploy, and view financial statements. It moves beyond traditional reporting constraints to help you efficiently design distinct types of reports. Financial reporting includes complex currency reporting requirements and financial dimension support. Therefore, account segments or dimensions are immediately available. No additional tools or configuration steps are required.
For more information, see Financial reporting.
Electronic reporting
To comply with the local government laws, businesses must provide many regulatory and compliance documents in a predefined format that is provided by the local government. Often, data that is required for these documents resides in finance and operations apps, and the documents might have to be provided in printed or electronic format.
Finance and operations apps provides electronic reporting features to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Electronic reporting is targeted at business users instead of developers. It lets business users configure different document formats instead of writing code, helping to make the processes for creating and adjusting formats for electronic documents faster and easier.
For example, businesses can adopt new regulatory requirements and generate business documents in the required format to electronically exchange information with government bodies, banks, and other parties.
Electronic reporting supports the TEXT, XML, Microsoft Word document, and OPENXML worksheet formats. However, an extension interface provides support for additional formats.
For more information, see Configure electronic reporting in Dynamics 365 Finance.
Analytical workspaces and Power BI integration
finance and operations apps delivers rich, interactive reports that are seamlessly integrated into application workspaces. By using graphics and visuals that are supported by Power BI, workspaces can provide highly visual, yet interactive experiences for users.
Users can interact with data by simply selecting or touching visuals on the page. They can see the cause and effect and perform simple what-if operations without leaving the workspace. Through stunning yet interactive visuals, users can now explore data and discover hidden trends. Power BI workspaces complement operational views with analytical insights based on near real-time information.
Microsoft Power BI Embedded service is automatically deployed and configured for all cloud-hosted, multi-box deployments. Customers can also customize the Power BI Embedded reports or replace the existing reports with Power BI reports that are developed and deployed on Power BI service.
For more information, see Analytical Workspaces (using Power BI Embedded).