In this blog series we focus on the top 5 pain points we hear from customers when they’re considering switching finance systems. Whether you’re using Sage 50, QuickBooks, Xero, Exchequer or something else, these are what time and again we get told are customers’ top reasons for switching systems.
I’ll show how Business Central addresses some of these pain points, and what your next steps should be if some of these resonate with you.
“OUR REPORTING IS POOR”
Our number 2 pain point is reporting. Most small businesses struggle with high quality reporting. Most reporting is Excel-based and requires a lot of manual work to prepare each month. There’s also limited, if any, capability to do detailed analysis.
Business Central has the concept of ‘Dimensions’ which are like analysis codes for your finances. Let’s take a look at what these are for.
Imagine a normal company might have a Chart of Accounts where they have, say, code 5000 for salaries and payroll expenses. Then maybe they have code 5000 01 01 for Department Code 1 and Cost Centre 1.
This works to a degree, but it’s a bit clunky. If you also had 50000102 and 50000103 then reporting on salaries is a case of exporting the G/L and summing the codes. Or, if you just want to see all costs related to ‘03’ cost centre, then you have to export the G/L and remove all the non-03 related transactions.
This is what Dimensions fixes. Instead of having hundreds of G/L codes which makes reporting very difficult, you can just use ‘Cost Centre’ and ‘Department’ – or whatever you want – as Dimensions.
As you can see, dimensions are a very powerful tool to enable detailed reporting with great drill-down and speed.
The above is just one example of where reporting is improved over older systems like Sage and QuickBooks. Your reporting can be taken to a whole new level once you layer Power BI, part of the Microsoft stack, onto the Business Central data.
Power BI can bring the data in Business Central “to life”. It allows employees and managers to get dashboards of their data, and we can use the Dimensions discussed above, as a way to filter and present the data in the right way. For example the dashboard below, is a lot easier to understand than it would be as a Pivot Table in Excel!
Make sure you deploy Power BI as soon as you can after Business Central goes live. It’s a fantastic way of giving management and teams the high quality reporting they’ve been after for so long!
Don’t forget to head on over to Business Central HQ for all the latest Business Central top tips and how tos.
INTERESTED IN BUSINESS CENTRAL FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
If you’d like to find our more about switching to Business Central so you can take advantage of these great features, then click below to see our customisable packs, prices and how you can switch to Business Central in as little as just ONE WEEK with our exclusive KickStart package.
