Advanced Budgeting, Reporting and Consolidates Empowering Dynamics 365 Business Central

This article discusses the arrival of Dynamics 365 Business Central and how one can achieve modern budgeting and reporting.

With Microsoft’s latest release of Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC), the company’s highly anticipated cloud ERP for small to mid-sized businesses, organizational leaders evaluating the solution will zoom in on budgeting, reporting and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.

But, let’s zoom out for a second…after a quarter of a century in the software industry, I have yet to see an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with outstanding budgeting, reporting and BI capabilities built into the ERP. The world’s most renowned solution in this realm continues to be the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet! There is actually a great reason for ERPs failing with their native functionality, and that is because the demands for advanced calculations and formatting, consolidations, currency conversion, budget workflow, charts, and custom budget input forms simply are too much for the otherwise controlled and accounting-focused ERP programs. Because of this, there is a main reason why there is a growing corporate performance management (CPM) and BI industry out there that connects these and other decision-making related holes in ERP systems. It has become a symbiotic relationship in many ways especially when there are integrations that exist between ERPs, BI and CPM solutions.

In terms of advanced budgeting and reporting, D365 BC has a native budgeting and reporting at the average level where most modern ERPs have it, which means 90-95% of all D365 BC customers will at least partially be utilizing their beloved Excel spreadsheets for some of their reports and a lot of their budgeting and forecasting. If they are ready to enhance their CPM and BI game, there are CPM tools like BI360 for a complete suite that is pre-integrated and also running on Microsoft Azure and BI solutions like Power BI who has recently become a leader in the Gartner BI Quadrant. And wait, there’s more!

To read more about Dynamics 365 Business Central, click here.