Reporting tool selection may seem to be very important, and in fact you have to distinguish between so-called Financial Reporting: Consolidated or Single company Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, Statement of Cash Flow – these are typically done in FRx Financial Reporting, please see our additional publications on FRx.
If your Microsoft Dynamics reporting requirements go beyond Financial Statements and you cannot find out-of-the-box report, then you should think about typical managerial reporting tool: Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft Access Reporting, MS Excel or even MS SQL Server Query, saved to the text file and opened in Excel. Let’s come through highlights:
1. Microsoft CRM. Especially for version 4.0, which is current, you should consider creating reports in Report Wizard in SSRS or Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Wizard gives you pretty good start and then if you need additional logic to be introduced, and if you are Visual Studio .Net developer – feel free to import newly created reporting into MS VS reporting project and work on its perfection. If you do not have programming expertise in-house, you can consider creating SQL Stored Procedure or SQL View in specially created custom SQL Server DB (please do not create custom objects in your MS CRM company database) and base Crystal Reports on these procedures and views. Here, again you need to know that SSRS is more flexible to be deployed on WWW versus CR (SSRS license is virtually free for existing MS SQL Server purchase)
2. Great Plains Dynamics GP. Here, you should review set of available ReportWriter reports (in Dynamics GP Reports section), then look at SSRS reports (here you will need to install them from GP CD #2 and we recommend them if you are on Dynamics GP version 10.0). Then, if your goals are not achieved, please consider CR. Good tactic is to create Microsoft SQL Server stored procedure or view and use them as the base for your Crystal Reports
3. Dynamics SL or Solomon. Here you are in very similar to Great Plains situation. If you are not happy with existing reports, feel free to create new custom reports in Crystal
4. Navision Dynamics NAV. Navision is a bit different, as its design is coming from C/Side shell. If you are still on native Navision C/Side database, you are likely working with C/ODBC module, if you moved to NAV on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005, then you should know that Navision companies are hosted in single MS SQL Server Database and each Navision table in this database has company ID prefix. We recommend you to resolve Navision reporting in MS SQL Server View or Stored Procedure and then pull the results in Crystal or SSRS
Dexterity Customization for Dynamics GP Evaluation Level Paper
When you are developer it is always a good idea to read technical manuals. But if you was just assigned to the IT team to decide if Dexterity is the right tool to customize your ERP application then first you need something which is in style of ‘easy reading papers’ or FAQ
Planning Dynamics GP Customization in Large Corporation
If you are reading this page then chances are high that you were not able to find ISV add-on and need customization project. Let’s talk about planning, quality assurance and future event such as version updates.
Dynamics GP Invoice Logo Attributed to Specific Company or Crossing the Borders of Three SOP Forms
Initial Great Plains Dynamics architecture had three SOP Invoice forms: Long, Short and Blank. Modern GP is popular in scenarios where you have more than three companies under one business entity umbrella
