This article is for retail organizations using Microsoft Dynamics NAV who want to explore today’s powerful, dynamic financial reporting product offerings.
Financial reporting is the arguable centerpiece of Business Intelligence (BI) analytics, showcasing the company’s financial status in what should be quickly accessible sets of financial and operational statements. Business seems to be moving at the speed of light today, perhaps especially the Retail industry. ERP systems, like Microsoft Dynamics NAV, typically offer native financial reporting functionality. However, the native reporting feature doesn’t usually meet modern consumer demands for more robust data analytics, as well as financial reporting that is industry-specific, for your end user goals. This article is going to discuss your independent software vendor (ISV) solutions for intuitive, business user friendly, and modern financial reporting for Retail companies to make smarter decisions about their future.
Let’s begin by exploring financial reporting more generally, then focus on reporting particularly for Retail companies. The good news is that there are more software options than ever since third party reporting tools are becoming more popular because of features and functions that are a result of consumer requests. Three main aspects in a tool that you should keeping your eyes peeled for that can expand and improve financial reporting tasks to make them more streamlined and modern: ease of use, flexibility, and security. We’ll use these three characteristics to analyze what you should be considering in a financial reporting solution: integration options; platforms choices, mobile reporting; and choosing between stand-alone reporting tools versus a complete suite of BI solutions.
You can query information from multiple data sources and by way of different routes. Whether you’re grabbing accounting data from Dynamics NAV or data from Point of Sale (POS) systems, you can choose to integrate directly from the source with some modern financial reporting tools, or you can pull from a BI data store. Reporting live from your data source translates to real-time analytics for more urgent or ad-hoc deadlines, but it can slow down the Dynamics NAV server, depending on how many users are querying bigger data sets, particularly if querying data simultaneously.
If you choose to go the BI data store route, whether it is an online analytical processing , you will achieve a high performance data integration without slowing down the server, but you do have to replicate your data to the storage space, which is an extra investment. OLAP cubes do require personnel with OLAP-specific experience and skills to maintain the device. But first, you should pinpoint what your specific Retail business needs are and evaluate how particular reporting tools provide you the ease of use, flexibility, and security you need.
To continue learning more about financial reporting for Retail organizations with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, read the rest of this article .
by Solver
