Navigating the Sea of Emerging Reporting Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP

Long gone are the days when all you could cheer for was Report Writer and Advanced Financial Analysis. Now, your colleagues seem to be talking sophistication: FRx, Crystal Reports, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SmartLists. You may wonder how it is that time went by so quickly and how you missed the boat.

In this article, I explain the most important tools that have emerged over the last couple years, in terms of where each stands in the reporting spectrum.

Reporting tools are divided into three categories:

1. Financial Reporting Tools. These tools allow the creation of reports designed to show your company's financial performance during any given period. Financial reporting tools work by interacting directly with the GL tables. Examples of such reports include the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow reports.

2. General-Purpose Reporting Tools. These tools adopt a "free style" approach to report development and supply the user with virtually endless possibilities for reporting transactional data. Examples of such reports include an aged trial balance report, a sales order document, a customer or a vendor list, among others.

3. Analytical Tools. Analytical tools are specialized reporting interfaces designed to take advantage of decision support software. These tools are generally used to perform time-based trend analysis of critical information, such as sales, purchases, inventory, and even financial information. Data is then rolled up and stored in cubes that can be rotated or "sliced and diced" by the user in numerous ways that general-purpose reports cannot imitate.

Available today are a number of reporting tools that can be catalogued as internal or external to the application. These tools provide various degrees of capabilities ...