Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016

You're reading from   Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 Excel, Jet Reports, and MS Power BI with GP 2016

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2017
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781786467614
Length 354 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Arrow right icon
Authors (2):
Arrow left icon
Belinda Allen Belinda Allen
Author Profile Icon Belinda Allen
Belinda Allen
Mark Polino Mark Polino
Author Profile Icon Mark Polino
Mark Polino
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting Data from Dynamics GP 2016 to Excel 2016 FREE CHAPTER 2. The Ultimate GP to Excel Tool – Refreshable Excel Reports 3. Pivot Tables – The Basic Building Blocks 4. Making Your Data Visually Appealing and Meaningful with Formatting, Conditional Formatting, and Charts 5. Drilling Back to the Source Data and Other Cool Stuff 6. Introducing Jet Reports Express 7. Building Financial Reports in Jet Express for GP 8. Introducing Microsoft Power BI 9. Getting Data in Power BI 10. Creating Power BI Visuals 11. Using the Power BI Service 12. Sharing and Refreshing Data and Dashboards in Power BI 13. Using the Power Query Editor 14. Bonus Chapter Index

Analysis Cubes

Microsoft Dynamics GP Analysis Cubes for Excel (ACE) is an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tool from Microsoft, designed for Dynamics GP.

A full implementation of ACE is beyond the scope of this book, but Analysis Cubes are one of the best sources of data for Excel-based dashboards, so we need to spend a few minutes with them.

ACE takes data from Dynamics GP 2016 and places it in a SQL Server based data warehouse for use with the SQL Server Analysis Services. Usually, this is done once a day due to the volume of data that is being pushed through. At its simplest, a data warehouse is a separate place to store information to report off. Often, the data is optimized to improve the reporting process as it moves into the data warehouse. A multidimensional or OLAP cube not only optimizes the structure of the data to improve reporting, it can pre-calculate and aggregate information to make reporting even more powerful.

The term "data warehouse" can scare people. Some companies go through painfully long data warehouse implementations with careful definition of every element and arguments over how to normalize data for consistency. Forget all of that.

The beauty of a powerful ERP system, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP, is that the database design is known, documented, and doesn't change a lot from version to version. This means that a standard data warehouse can be built that works for companies using Dynamics GP, and it won't require months of work to set up.

The Dynamics GP Analysis Cubes product contains well-designed, aggregated tables for most Dynamics GP modules. For people using third-party add-ons, a customized cube with appropriate measures and dimensions would be required.

After you work through this book and build a few dashboards, you'll start to bump into some of the limitations of reporting directly off Dynamics GP data. These can include placing an undue load on the GP server, difficulty in finding and joining tables, and the struggle of calculating measures by hand. You'll also want to build more complex dashboards as you grow. Using Analysis Cubes for Excel is a great next logical step.

As ACE moves data into a data warehouse for reporting, data-heavy dashboards won't put a load on Dynamics GP. Also, because Analysis Cubes prepopulates and calculates information, complex calculations are available for reporting without having to create formulas in Excel. For example, in the next screenshot, you can see that Budget Variance, Current Ratio, Debit to Equity, and Gross Margin Percentage are all available in Analysis Cubes to simply drag into a pivot table for use in a dashboard. No calculation needed:

Analysis Cubes

Additionally, users have the option of reporting against the data-warehouse relational database or reporting against the cubes.

From a practical standpoint, using Analysis Cubes is very similar to the process we will walk through in Chapter 2, The Ultimate GP to Excel Tool – Refreshable Excel Reports. The techniques used in this book to create a dashboard also work well when building an Analysis Cube based dashboard. Analysis Cubes for Dynamics GP is included in the starter pack in GP 2016, so customers upgrading from previous versions have an even stronger reason to implement it.

Note

For an in-depth look at some of these reporting solutions, including SSRS and Analysis Cubes, we recommend that you refer to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Reporting by Chris Liley and David Duncan from Packt Publishing. Although this book references an older version of Dynamics GP, the content on Analysis Cubes will still be valid and work with the current version, Dynamics GP 2016.

You have been reading a chapter from
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 - Second Edition
Published in: Mar 2017
Publisher:
ISBN-13: 9781786467614
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at $19.99/month. Cancel anytime
Banner background image