Improving the measurement of your company's prosperity
Measuring a company's prosperity is based on financial data. This measurement is often faced with a lack of quality data, which is often due to the lack of flexibility of the information system in capturing and reporting financial data. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 marks a big step forward in this respect.
In the context of financial data acquisition, AX 2012 brings the following innovations compared to previous versions:
Unlimited number of financial dimensions
The basic financial dimension of an accounting transaction is the general ledger account. In addition, information systems typically work with the financial dimensions of Cost Centre, Department or Order. An unlimited number of financial dimensions can now be written to an AX 2012 accounting transaction. You can thus break down accounting information into greater detail. Has revenue been generated on the web or in the brick-and-mortar store? At which store and which POS was the revenue posted? What vendor negotiated the yield? Product, Product Group, Vendor, Asset Card.. These are just a few examples of the most commonly used financial dimensions, of which there are more than 30 available in AX 2012.
Rules for filling in the financial dimensions
An unlimited number of financial dimensions can make data acquisition more complicated - the more dimensions a user has to fill in, the more time it takes.
The new platform of financial dimensions and organizational hierarchies allows you to track your company's financial health down to the atomic level, while viewing financial data from any angle.
Therefore AX 2012 adds financial dimensions automatically wherever it can, for example, the sales channel, the shop and the staff takes from the sales order. In addition, a rule management tool is provided to fill in the values of the financial dimensions. Thus, you will be able to enter different financial dimensions for revenue accounts, different ones for expense accounts, and for some accounts the financial dimensions will not be tracked at all.
Organisational hierarchy (groups of financial dimensions)
As an extension of the financial dimensions, AX 2012 allows creation of organisational hierarchies, i.e. a tree structure of financial dimensions and their groups. A typical example from our retail practice is the different view of stores used by our customer BCC Elektro - an electronics retailer in the Netherlands (more information about implementation of AX 2012 R3 in BCC Elektro)
- stores by size (Small, Medium, Large)
- stores by location (North, South, West, East)
- stores by sales channel (brick-and-mortar store, web, call-centre...)
The number of user-definable organizational hierarchies is not limited. In reporting, you can view financial data for any node in any organisational hierarchy and view financial results from any angle.
To summarize, in the context of financial data acquisition, you will benefit from a new platform of financial dimensions and organizational hierarchies that will allow you to:
- tracking your company's financial condition down to the atomic level, i.e. in the maximum level of detail
- view financial data from any angle
Let's now ask the question, how can the above innovations be used in financial data reporting? We will introduce two more new features in AX 2012:
Management reporter
The Management reporter reporting tool gives you online access to the AX 2012 database allows reporting 100% actual data. You can work with data from one specific company, but you can just as easily work with data from all the companies you manage in AX 2012 at once. You can define your reports in a user-defined way and have them emailed to you every morning at a set time.
The management reporter can work with the financial dimensions and organizational hierarchies mentioned above. So you can switch the level of data detail directly in the report: for a specific store, for all large stores (hierarchy by size), for stores in the north of the country (hierarchy by location), or for the whole company. Of course, drill-down is available - displaying detail down to the level of specific accounting transactions.
Dashboards
Imagine now that the prosperity and financial health of your company is signalled by a traffic light on a large LCD panel in your office. Similar to how modern tech support providers signal the state of your IT infrastructure. Green for "OK", Orange for "Caution", and Red for "Danger".You can see the semaphore, or rather the whole set of semaphores, directly on the AX 2012 homepage, so accessing them is very fast. By visually checking the colours, you can immediately see the current situation. When the light is red, you can click on the indicator and examine further details, specific numbers, etc.
This is how the so-called Dashboards or Signposts work. Technologically, they are based on analytical reports that you may already know from previous versions of AX.
Analytical reports are designed for more detailed analysis of business data and trend search - 15 data cubes are available in AX 2012 for this purpose. In addition to the data for analysis, the data cubes also contain calculated financial indicators, which can be displayed in AX 2012 using the Dashboards.
Use Dashboards - "traffic lights" for a quick visual check of your company's financial health.
In summary, the major new features of AX 2012 in the area of reporting are:
- Management Reporter and its ability to display financial data in any level of detail - to the level of specific financial dimensions, user-definable groups of financial dimensions, or the entire company
- Dashboards or Signals for instantly getting information about the current status of your company
Let's conclude with a recap of how AX 2012 contributes to improving your company's prosperity measurement:
- when acquiring data
- allows greater detail to be tracked using financial dimensions and groups of dimensions
- when reporting
- uses the stored detail of financial dimensions in Management reporter or other reporting tools
- Allows quick visual check of financial health using Dashboards
Are you interested in improving your company's prosperity measurement? More about the solution Dynamics AX for retail, wholesale and logistics can be found on our website.
Filip Rozsíval is a Senior AX Consultant at Blue Dynamic.
