Financial Reporting Overview in Dynamics 365

Hello everybody, I'd like to welcome you to today's Dynamic 365 Tech Talk. Today's topic, Financial Reporting in Dynamics 365 Finance. My name is Janice and I'll be your moderator today. We are broadcasting this session through Teams Live Events and the audio can be heard through your device speakers. This session is being recorded on behalf of the Microsoft Corporation. When you join this event, your name, email address, and or phone number May be viewable by other session participants in the attendee list. By joining you are agreeing to this experience. The recording will be available on the Tech Talks Community Dynamics page within five business days. If you have questions for the presenters who need support, please use the Q&A panel located on the right hand side of your screen. Our presenters will be responding to your questions during today's event and there should be some time at the end for further questions. I'd like to thank you for your patience during these announcements. Now on to the main event. Presenting for us today from Microsoft, we have R&D Solution Architect, Severin Bach. We have Ginny Wong, who is a Senior Program Manager. And rounding out our presenter team today is Christopher Biesman, who is a Senior Software Engineer. So without any further delay, Severin, welcome and thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Hey. I'm Severin and I'm happy to talk about financial reporting today. Before I move into the content, I'd like to use the opportunity to pitch the brand new Dynamics 365 implementation guide. This is an asset we as a Fastbook team produced. It contains thousands of recommendations and things you should know when you'd like to implement Dynamics 365. I kindly ask you to check out the license guide. it is available for you for free just follow the link we have here for you in the presentation thank you okay let's talk about financial reporting this is the agenda for today i will start with you know using financial reporting i will show you how to set up how to navigate how to open how to design after that i move over to chris chris will talk about the data mark and then i will take it back for for some lcs and troubleshooting insights all right so with that let's move on using financial reporting in the beginning i like to explain the use case of the feature so a financial accountant needs to create reports that will support the company in the month and close process so basically this is something every company needs to do at the month end and this financial reporting is helping you to solve the requirements in the area of consolidated financial reports the management reporting package you need to produce and generate for each month and for each year in closing maybe you need to report by subsidiary there are thousands of different requirements we do see and financial reporting is the feature to get that requirement solved Okay, so let's double click on that. Financial reporting allows financial and business professionals to create, maintain, deploy, and view financial statements. It moves beyond traditional reporting constraints to help you efficiently design various types of financial reports. Financial reporting includes dimension support, therefore account segments or dimensions are immediately available without additional tools or additional configuration. To run a report, you need to use a report designer. This designer helps you to create, maintain, and use building blocks. I will double click on building blocks in a second. And to generate a report, you can use report schedules or you can run a report ad hoc. please keep in mind it's about dimensions and account segments so we're talking about main accounts we're talking about financial dimensions this is about the general ledger transactions the financial reporting is not including subject to transactions keep that in mind that we're talking about the general ledger transactions the main ledger not the sub ledger all right with that i go double click on the components we have the financial reporting has two components. The report designer which helps you to combine building blocks to define a report, and the report schedules, which helps you to automate the report generation. So for example, if you have your month end, and normally you're done within the fourth day of the month, you can run the month end procedure, so to generate your report package automatically, that the reports are available and generated if you need it. so that's basically the idea in special cases for sure you can go and and generate them manually i will demo that in a bit okay so what is a building block building blocks is the definition of the report so let's think about a report and with the report have to have some some kind of rows right we like to have rows on the on the report and we like to have columns and that's about building So a row definition defines the descriptive lines on the report. It lists the values that contain the values of each line item. It can include formatting and special calculation. So for example, a row can be just a value for a specific main account, or a row can be a calculation. So summary of some rows you have above, as an example. You can go complex if you like, that's for sure. Column definition is about the columns you like to see on the paper or on the screen right the column is the name is a description of is maybe the account number a column definition is defining the period is this the period of the current month or is this the current period minus one which is the month before so or you like to go plus one looking into future when you have something that's actually posted for the next month already right so this is the column definition next to rows and columns we have reporting three definitions. Reporting three definitions, think about the organizational hierarchy you have. Typically, there's a holding and the holding has a lot of subsidiaries, a lot of legal entities which sits below. You need to report based on that hierarchy. Sometimes you're on the first level, sometimes you go on the second, on the third. It really depends on the requirement. Another example would be the financial dimension. hierarchy for example the cost centers you have or the combination of business units and related cost centers so with reporting trees you are able to run the reports like the proper laws of the balance sheet based on that reporting tree and you can go if you have the right security rights on that you can go and exit those on the second on the fourth level the beauty of financial reporting that the organization hierarchies you can go set up in financial report in the finance operations apps will be automatically moved over into the reporting service so this is kind of cool because you do need to maintain those twice and once you're updating on the hierarchy in financial based apps it will automatically update the reporting tree in the financial reporting so if we have a world and a column and reporting tree we can take all of them and we can combine it in a report definition which is at the end the report we like to generate so basically every row every column and every tweet definition can be used multiple times so that you do not have to have thousands of different column definitions you maybe have a 10 a 12 you know and then you can leverage them for your reports you need to generate all right next slide is about security so how you can access the financial reporting for this we have we have privileges available privileges to maintain financial reporter the reports right so that you can manage the security setup that's basically security administrator um then we have the privilege to maintain financial report itself um then there's a privilege which helps to generate financial reports and we do have a privilege available to view financial reports i kindly ask you to carefully take a look to the roles we have available and copy paste or consume them for your own security roles you are going to create in your implementation projects. It's major important to define which user, which role needs to use the financial reporting. If you'd like to learn more about the different security options available, please visit the blog post in this presentation. Please find the link here on that page. It contains a lot of more insights on that security options and there's a quick YouTube video available as well. So check it out next is in general access to the server to the um to the service of the application you can go and restrict the access to a specific reporting unit let's go one step back so keep in mind that when you have the security setup in transfer rate is done and the user is only available to select this specifically the entity right this exam security setup on the legal entities will be reflected and it's relevant for the financial reporting as well so that we get this clarified Okay, and on top you can go restrict the access to the reporting unit. So that's speaking the common business scenario are scenarios where Controllers should only access data of the business unit or cost center. They are responsible for so if I'm going to own The the auto sales right and I only should go and report on auto sales with restrict with extra restriction I can get that done. So this is major program and nice feature to take a look at so with that i will go and run the demo in the beginning i will show you you know a general introduction a little bit basic setup a little a little bit look and feel after that i will run with the designer and after that i will show you how to view how to generate how to navigate with a little bit more details all right so and with that i will change my screen and it will move into the um finance operation tabs so this is basically finance and operations and you will find the financial reporting sitting inside the general ledger module or you will find it in the budgeting module so everywhere where you need to have financial reports you can go and and open the the tool so let's click on general ledger and let's click on the financial reports here So that would be our starting point. Before we can use it, we need to take care that the financial reporting setup is done correctly. So we have a lot of financial dimensions across a lot of legal entities. So we need to make sure that we go and select the financial dimensions we really need in our financial reporting. If there is no need for that financial dimension to be used in a financial report, please do not move it in. That's about the performance impact. So... everything we do not need let's not move it over chris will talk about the architecture in the background why i'm by i'm saying here moving it over all right once the setup is done we can go and consume and can use the financial reports so this is the financial report overview you see here we have under control the database the default report report package so every implementation can go and consume it you can import it in every in every environment So with that you can really go and view a report. Yeah, just a quick one balance sheet. That's a report so you can go old school. You can work in copy paste. I will go a little bit deeper during my next demo. Alright, so that's about the financial reporting inside F&O. And if you like to edit and create new reports, you need to click on that button here. Once you're clicking on the button. you will see that an additional application will open and this additional application is this one right so looking at this application and it's this cloud service as well so you're downloading an application which is running on a laptop but basically it connects to our assets we have available in our cloud offering so you do not need to install something regular no admin needs to maintain it's all running automatically and i recommend to check the latest microsoft edge version or the latest Chrome and on the Chrome you need to have a specific edit installed which is available in the Chrome store for free. Alright, so in the application we do have segments. So we have segments for report definitions, row definition, column definition, reporting tree definitions. So you can go group reports together and you can schedule and you have some security setup available. So that's basically our main menu and when we are sitting on the report definition we can go and double click on on the report. And that's our report definition. So as mentioned, the report definition is combining the backend setup we have or the backend definitions. For example, rows, column, reporting trees, right? You can go and define, you know, what kind of company needs to be used, right? If you go for any, this report will be generated for any legal entity you have available. If this report is just something where you like to use it for DE. and that you can go select and only in this entity the report will be available once generated So basically that's very simple. Forward we have additional setup available which could be which could drive a lot of complexity, but I don't like to overcomplicate that type of you. You can work on some on some out mechanism. You have the possibility to add some headers and fooders. You can put in some images if you like and and we have some some settings so you can enable the rounding or it can move if you'd like to see. negative numbers with a minus or in brackets. You can work on the coloring if you like. So this is the report definition. All right, let's take a look to our rows. So this is here a summary income statement. So with this summary income statement, we have to have specific rows, and this is the row definition. So it's a table format. We have columns, so we have a row code which is very important. We have a description line. and then we have here the format code and additional information and settings I can do for this row. For example, when I double-click here, you see you can define a row as total, as a complex calculation, as a description, as an underscore. You really can go and design your report in this tabular format. For this scenario, I have here a line where I like to see some sales. Let's take a look to the right-hand side. This is a column. which is linking to a financial dimension so that means i can here select all my financial dimensions which i have selected in the beginning you saw i have a lot of financial dimensions active therefore this is the very huge table here we do see main account categories so that means every main account will be used which sits in this main account category or you can define ranges as well or you can use multiple um you can use main accounts as well so it should be this one here if i'm not totally wrong oh that's that's a bank account financial dimension is got activated but somewhere here you will see the main account as well and and this is not that not that straightforward because we have too much values so i do recommend for you to create dimension sets that you are have your specific financial dimensions you need for the purpose of the you know for the purpose right if you go and create a specific report which needs cost centers and business unit select the main the dimension set which only have business unit and cost center included that you have a better overview so But basically this is how you go and design the rows. You need to describe what you like to see. This text will be auto-populated once you're entering a main account or main account category. This row code is important because let's take a look to the total. So here we are saying, I like to summarize row 130 to 250. So look, those lines will be summarized. and therefore the row code is very much important so i kindly ask you really to to to have some space between those numbers that you're able to add new numbers afterwards once the report is what once the row definition is saved you can easily go copy paste um you know to move that roads into another row definition or you can export and import it if you're thinking about you know specific the stages from from dev test prod right because we don't like to do something abroad we always do tests and then we promote to prod but those um you know scenarios are very much supported all right so um next to the row definition we have the column definition and the column definition is okay the name is same column so it's defining the columns we like to have on the report so the same idea we have table structure um but it's a little bit upside down because from left to right we do have now the columns we'd like to see and the definitions and the setup is you know top down so you can define a specific column type this is here a description row or you can have some some um some column for the amount from a financial dimension um etc so basically here you see this here is a column which is using a financial dimension value it's using the actual um policy layer it's using the base financial year for the reporting date and the first period of that base that means if our financial calendar is starting from january to december our first period is january and the second period is february if your financial calendar is starting from july as you do in microsoft your first period will be july you know the 12th period would be june So this is a little bit tricky in the beginning, but you will get into it, that's for sure. So this is how you're designing and how you're defining which kind of period you'd like to enter, how much columns you'd like to have, and you can create here more columns to the right. all right this is the um this is the column definition the report definition is is similar so let's go to report definitions and those are the organization hierarchies which are imported from finance operations apps let's take a look to the contoso holding um tree definition this is the organization hierarchy which is created it got created automatically for me and this year are some of the entities so the structure of the entities i do see so i'm not able to edit and move it away and this is maintained in finance operations apps directly and i could leverage this so this example as i shared at the beginning you can think more complex right and if you like you can create your custom um two definitions so something which is not maintained in finance and operations app which is not an organization hierarchy but is some combination and some hierarchy of financial dimensions you like to focus on so i kindly ask you to check it out i like that feature very much Alright, so that's about the designer presentation. So the introduction we did the designer I was explaining and the third demo part we have is about the generation and the view of financial reports. So let's go and generate a report manual. i go and switch back to my designer you have the possibility to generate the report directly from the designer so if you're a designer and you're working on that you can go here and enjoy the report you can just generate it and then a new execution is starting you will see you have your queue and you can see what kind of steps will be executed and what the status so at the moment it's queuing so it's waiting for the service to come back now it's processing And once it's processing, it goes in, it loads the definition, it's executing the SQL statements on the data mart. Chris will talk about data mart. So we're not making noise on the finance operations apps. You know, this financial reporting is only using data which sits in that data mart. Okay, now it is available, right? And I can go click here on the button, right, to see the view. this is to see the report and i'm going directly into find splash apps and the ul is opening from for me and i'm sitting on the report i just generated right so that's the idea so you do not need to use a designer to generate a report you can go and generate a report basically directly from the user interface so this is the report we just created so you see the time this was me seconds ago right you can go and generate the report here So for users who don't have access to report designer, they are very welcome to use that user interface here. All right. If you don't like to generate that report manual, because this is your report which is working and you do need to cross-check and you're sure all transactions are in, at the point of generation, you can run report schedules. So let's create a report schedule here. You can. select an individual report or you can select your report group so your financial package right and then you can define when i'd like to start the recurrence and if it's a daily weekly monthly execution right so with monthly and we can for example go on the force uh on the fourth weekday each month right or we can go on the last weekday in a month it really depends what you like to generate you are very much flexible on the um on the execution here right so that's once it's saved it's active the the the batching is running and it will generate the the reports in time automatically for you so you do not need to care about the manual um generation all right so let's go inside the um the reports so this is my report and as i said you can you can really use that report so you can scroll down and you scroll from left to right it's an interactive report you have so you can for example hide the headers if you like or you can hide the details and you only see the summaries if you like to do that you can zoom in and zoom out you have you know the possibility and that's amazing in my point of view to change the currency on the fly so you can go directly to europe's and you do have the possibility to have to have a separated exchange rate type so you can have a different change exchange rate if that is required or you have the same so that you really can can ensure that you're using the correct um change exchange rates right when you're changing that um currencies on the fly right so let's go back and now it's using it's recalculating in the in the correct um In the correct currency right next to that currency opportunity you are able to export the report into Excel right and with Excel. The cool thing is that you're not getting just the values you are. You're getting the totals as well, right? So this is calculating right now. Let's give it a second and then it's here. So now we are sitting here on yours right? I think that's kind of fast what we just saw, so it's happening on the fly. If you'd like to change between currencies, that's fantastic feature. when you go and export you really can can can define what you like to export and then you're getting an entire express sheet and it's not containing just values it contains the the formulas as well in excel so if you're defining a summary sum of a specific row right this logic those um formulas will be moved into excel as well that it's easy for you to adjust and to move forward if you like um for sure you can go and print um but you know since we are digital No, I think printing is not that often happening, so really use that display feature here. On report options, you can go and add additional filters. So for example, if you really like to filter on a specific cost center or on a specific main account, you can go and define that filter and then the report rows will be reduced. The next cool feature I'd like to present you is the possibility to drill down. So let's assume we like to learn more about what's inside this sales row and what happened in march so i can click down on march and with that i do see what's inside we have product sales we have you know product sales homes that basically some some main accounts which are sitting below and i can add the possibility to go to the next level so i can really drill down into the into the details and here i have a possibility to drill down to the report transaction level let's do that so this is double clicking on that line and now would you see the the transactions in detail which got posted i think that's that's another report um the details um um there's a different report um i can i can show that for the for the business for the balance sheet in a bit um so but anyway what i like to show you is here you can go and open trans open account transactions so that means with one click we are going into the form where we do see account transactions. So now we are sitting not in the financial reporting anymore, we are sitting directly in the user interface, which is allowing us to deep dive on the voucher to understand, you know, the original transactions to settle the settlements, the audit trail, what kind of original document is used. So that's amazing. So with financial reporting, you have the possibility to get reports done. you have a lot of details you can interactively drill down into details and you can jump you can jump into the is the general ledger transactions to really start exploring where this transaction is coming from if you like to understand details so um that's pretty awesome the next example i'd like to show you is the example about the um reporting pre-definition let's double click on the benefit so here's a different report i produced for you and this viewport is using um is using the um the reporting trees before we do that let me show you the the drill down on on uh which which wasn't in the report before right here i'm now on the third level and with that i just see here the posting right the transactions on the which happened on the combination of the um of the um mini constructor right so that i'm not talking something which is not working and okay balance sheet this report this balance sheet report is having in the background the um reporting tree in use so let's take a look at the reporting definition the report definition and here we do see we have here the um organization hierarchy selected and i i entered the controls of holding right reporting tree Remember, this is maintaining fine separations, which gets synchronized and we can directly use it. Let's move to the report again. You see here's a button. You can click on that and you can really go and change into the details very quickly. So let's take a look to the postings which happened for Germany. Or if you'd like to go on the USA, that's no problem. So I can drill down, I can really select the specific level. or like to go on the controls entertainment systems only then i do see and i'm getting some of them right this is a fantastic feature how it can easily you know report based on an organization hierarchy based on a hierarchy which is about business unit and cost centers or department there are a lot of different requirements and this is the amazing functionality i like a lot so um that's about my my demo and with that i move over to the presentation again And I will overhand to Jeannie. Jeannie, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Thank you, Severin. So with all that we've seen with Report Designers, there are a couple of issues that we do want to talk about. You may face when trying to open Report Designer, especially if it's your first time. There may be times when Report Designer doesn't start when you select New or Edit, or if the user who is using Report Designer hasn't been assigned... the required or correct permissions to use financial reporting. You also may see situations where you can't proceed past the Click Once report designer sign-in page. So you can get to the sign-in page, but you cannot complete the sign-in. So instead of going through all of that in painful detail, we went ahead and created a great doc with troubleshooting issues. It will be included in this deck that will be made available to you after this session. Can we go to the next slide, please? So we do want to talk about reporting performance. I think this is always a topic when in any kind of reporting. When running reports in financial reporting, you have great flexibility and capability to run reports down to the transaction detail like we saw from what Stephen just showed us. But with this great capability, the awareness needs to be there that running large reports with many rows and columns can sometimes cause delays in performance of slow running reports. And so we want to highlight some examples of what may cause these delays so that you're aware of them when you're designing your reports. The first one is adding a large number of dimensions and Severin had gone through that earlier in looking at the types of dimensions you can add in and he cautioned that you should select dimensions that you know you need to report on. For example, if you're doing segment reporting by Business unit, you want to make sure to include that, but if you have a dimension for location that maybe you don't need, you would want to exclude that. Also, adding attributes from accounts payable and accounts receivable to a single report can also slow down reports. Now, these capabilities do exist and can be used. This is merely to inform you of what might be slowing down your performance. The second thing is historical currency translations. we usually recommend using this only for retained earnings equity and long-term liabilities and i was reminded yesterday sometimes they're also used in fixed assets um historical currency translations cause a slowdown because what the system is doing is going back and looking at every single day and looking at the currency exchange rate for that transaction for that day and calculating it so that does cause a little bit of a delay as you can imagine The third thing is tree design. You know, there were three components to the building blocks of a report and the third one is a tree design. Now, how I like to explain this one is when you create a report with many levels in a tree, and I believe the example we saw earlier had 11 levels in the tree. And when you have a report with say 20 columns and 50 rows, then, and you have a tree with maybe 20 units in the tree. you're actually creating a report with a thousand fields, right? Some of which may be calculations 20 times. So it does take time. So consider that when you're running a report with many levels in a tree as that can be performance affecting. Finally, of course, running reports in transaction detail. You know, as you know, there may be some accounts in your chart of accounts that has many transactions and might take a little bit longer. And so be aware that when you're choosing to run a report in transaction detail, that if you are including those specific accounts that may have lots of in and outs or lots of transactions, that that could also potentially cause delays. Great. I thank you for your time. I'm going to pass it off to Chris to talk about the data mart. Thanks, Jenny. So I'm going to take a few minutes to discuss the data mart and how it's used for reporting. First, let's start with a little bit of detail on how the back end of financial reporting looks. You can see a little bit of an architectural overview here. There are two main services for financial reporting. We have the application service and the process service towards the right of the diagram. The application service is interactive and it responds when you're making requests from either the ClickOnce report designer or when you're interacting with the financial reports on the web pages. This service stores and retrieves data from the financial reporting database for your use. The other service on the lower right is the process service. It's not interactive and it acts sort of like a batch. It processes the jobs for report generation or for the data integration. It brings metadata from the AOS and financial data from the operational database into the data mart for use in financial reporting. So on to a little bit of detail about the data mart itself. Next slide. So the data mart like we mentioned is used to generate reports. It's using data that's synced from the general ledger and the financial tables into the data mart and we run the reports against this data mart in order to avoid excess load on the online database change tracking is used to improve the performance of the sync through incremental loads and we make use of a system account in order to gather metadata from the aos service so particularly the fr service user account This account is only used to communicate between financial reporting and the AOS services. You can find a little more detail about pre-configured system accounts on the doc link provided in the slide deck. So next slide. Since the data mart is a copy of the operations data, it's possible to reset the data mart if it becomes out of sync. A reset is going to clear all the data that came from operations. but it will maintain the things that you created in Report Designer, such as your report designs, your user groups, or your report schedules that we talked about. Generally speaking, a data mart reset isn't going to be needed to be done manually. All the automated processes that you would start from LCS will include the reset if it's needed. So for example, when you refresh databases from production to sandbox for testing purposes, the two databases are copied in sync so there's no need for a data mart reset or if you're importing an ax database alone then the reset will be automatically performed as part of the lcs process an exception to this might be if you're working with a development environment where you're doing some of these operations manually in that case you might need to do a reset to keep things in sync Please reach out to support if you find the need to perform a data mart reset outside of a case where you've gotten these two databases out of sync. For example, if you find that you keep needing to run resets to fix data on your reports, this is a sign that we need to investigate a product issue and we'd like to know about it. So our goal is to keep the data mart integration as seamless as possible. There's a little bit more details on the doc link provided on this slide. So we can go on to the last slide here. So when you do perform a data mart reset, it's a fairly simple process. You'll initiate the reset from report designer. There the dialogues are going to walk you through the options and warn you about the amount of downtime you may have for financial reporting. The amount of time it takes to bring the data back into the data mart depends on the number of financial transactions that you have. and also the dimension combinations. So as mentioned earlier, the reporting dimensions that you select will impact the performance of the system in that case. For example, if you have 100,000 transactions, you'll probably take less than an hour to do a data mart reset. Or if you have something like 100 million transactions, it's likely to take a few hours. The reset itself takes place in two phases. First, all the data are removed from the data mart, and this is when you'll wait for a response on the reset dialog. After that, the data integrations are restarted to load the data as it can be read from the databases. The integration status is shown in the subsequent dialogs during the designer resets. You can check the documentation for more information on that as well. With that, I'll hand it back to Severin to close us out. Thanks Chris. At the end I'd like to touch base on the LCS and the troubleshooting. If you're, you know, keep in mind we have regular environment downtimes since we have to do some system maintenance and each time we have a downtime in the environment for system maintenance so every couple of weeks we go and deploy the latest and greatest functionality for financial reporting so the data mart and reporting application i presented to you right so each downtime you're getting the latest and greatest if if you need to get an update quicker because you're facing some kind of issue right you do see those fixes available on the lts issue search and you can consume those fixes by just deploying the latest and greatest cumulative um quality updates so it will go and deploy the latest and greatest on your finance operations apps and will move the updates into the financial reporting as well so this is very much straightforward keep in mind every downtime mair or financial reporting will be updated and if you'd be to be if you'd like to be quicker then you're more than welcome to consume the data's greatest quality updates to get these fixes deployed to your service. So that's all on the LCS and troubleshooting. It's kind of straightforward and with that we are at the end of our presentation and we have now time for Q&A. There are a couple of questions and thank you very much for those questions. It's very important that we do know what questions keeps you awake. so please continue to drop the questions and we're working on the answering in the background so um jeannie do you like to um rephrase some questions which are reported for you or is that something you'd like to add um sure i think i could answer the question on does microsoft have any plans to run financial reporting on power bi we currently have a power bi embedded solution that's already available. Financial reporting is a tool in itself that's separate from that, so I hope that answers your question like that. And then I can take this other one, is how can you consolidate reports in Financial Reporter when some of your legal entities use the online consolidation functionality? So if I understand correctly, that means you have... some of your consolidations happening in online consolidations, but you need to consolidate those companies into additional companies for maybe an all-up consolidation. You can reference the consolidated company in your financial reporting report and do your consolidations that way. And then is it possible when we drill to show only main account and not the full account with dimensions on the transaction level. I don't believe that's possible 7 and Chris. Would you like to weigh in on that? I'm on the same, so I think of the account structure you see if I'm not totally mistaken, but if this is a blocking thing right, reach out to support or you know, feel free to contact us directly that we can help. to move forward if this is a blocking thing in your in your project and i think the first there's another question is how are the financial dimensions incorporated into that particular report i am not sure which reports are seven maybe is this one that you could take No, I missed the details on that question. So what report are you referring to? So, I mean, financial dimensions can be brought in on the row or the column level. So you can always filter by financial dimension. If you're looking at, for example, if you're looking at a P&L and you would like to have a profit and loss by financial dimensions, you can definitely put that in the column. I hope that helps answer that question a little bit. great any other questions i think there's there was an important one for for kind of um huge dynamics between c5 finance operations deployments um so do we like to yeah so i mean we definitely have customers with millions of lines of data again it's not about the amount of data it's really about how the report is written and that's why when we brought up the topic earlier You know if you're bringing in a report and you're trying to report on multiple, maybe multiple dimensions across columns, and so maybe you have 30, 40, 50 columns and in a report and then you run that report within a tree with another 20 or 30 units. So that can take a while. So it's not about how much data and of course eventually when there's a large amount of data and I'll let Chris expand on that more. but it's all about how the report is written. So financial reporting can definitely handle data with millions of records in the GL. It's really all in how the report is written. So report design is very important. There's a new question on the exchange rate. so this is um this is where you can have a dedicated exchange rate type on the main account you will find the setup where you can define that exchange rate type so that you have a specific exchange rate type for the financial reporting feature um jeannie there's a question about the the workspace for the cfo overview which we have in power bi and the question is of this workspace is based on the reports in financial reporting i think it's a clear no right we have the financial reporting as an as a feature which is using the data mark and then in parallel we do have a couple of workspaces where we do have available dashboards and those dashboards are sitting based on the on the equity measurements we have available right so aggregate measurements um are the basic baseline for the copy of dashboards you will see embedded right so it's not using that reports because at the end we only have reports templates available for user to default reports we don't have you know any out of the box report to get this balance sheet done or this problem loss sheet done right so that's basically important it's really up to each project to leverage the templates and go adjust um to fit your requirements and that's basically the same for the workspaces as well so you're starting from our point of view and then you can go and extend you can add columns you can shape it to make it look better There's a question about financial sets created in F&O. Yeah, I'm thinking you, I think you're talking about financial sets you can define on a trade balance in F&O where you can go and have a trade balance available in a form. No, these financial dimension sets will be not moved over into the financial reporting. In financial reporting you're defining your own financial sets because it's just, you know, the way how you're grouping but there's no pre-calculation. happening in financial reporting there's no integration between it's really to help the end users or the designer to select the right dimension set the dimensions and they do not need to use that entire list if you only have five dimensions you know there's no need for you to to work on on dimension sets the benefit of dimension sets and fno is that you can run you know you can run the calculations right you can sum and you can consolidate on the financial dimension sets regular so that you can when you can go and open the trade balance the amount and the totals are calculated because the batch work the batch job was executed at night so that's the benefit of the financial dimension sets that the totals are pre-calculated that the end users do not need to click on the button and i kindly ask you to pre-calculate because you know when you're calculating every time the interviews are starting that form in the in the finance operations apps it takes a while so really leverage the batch up setting we haven't we we moved a lot of fixes in the past so you will see a lot of improvement um we did due to the number of transactions we see in the projects yeah genius there another question you'd like to answer verbally or christopher do Something where you can talk about. Looks like we're getting quite a few questions about exchange rates and seven. Have you do you have any examples that you could share? Maybe if you're using different exchange rates in the same chart of accounts that you've maybe built. Yeah, go ahead. The the the change rate will be useful in the management reporter, which is on the main account, right? So the main accounts is the main account is available. and on each main account you can go and define the change rate which gets used on the financial reporting right and this setup cannot be you know um changed uh on the legal empty right there are only a few setups you can change on the entity level for example you can pause or you can you can you can suspend the main account or you can have some some additional settings but as far as i know you know the change rate type I cannot change on the legal entity level. If I'm not totally mistaken right now, I can. I can check that. Yeah, they are notes available on the on the dimension sets, but again it's it's straightforward. It is just about going to the sets and you can select. That's, I think, not that rocket science. So just feel free to explore the dimension sets in the user interface directly in the management reporting. Yeah, you can't have multiple exchange rates on a main account for... for uh for months and um so there's only one you you to use um checkout docs for the exchange rate types there's a lot of information you can find okay i think with that um we are done with that tech talk oh that's a good question here we have a question about the um the xpl taxonomy in the financial reporting are you aware about this this area or is this something we would like to cover offline yeah let me take this one offline i actually um it's an interesting question i've never looked into it before um i will go ahead and respond to it thank you okay so maria please please contact directly uh we're more than happy to to talk offline about that feature All right, Janice. All right, thank you, Severin. All right, everyone, I would like to take a moment here and bring your attention to a link that I just posted in the Q&A panel. That is a link to a short survey for this web conference. We ask that you please take a moment before logging out to access it. We'd like your feedback on today's session and what you'd like to hear and see in future events. So we do appreciate the time you take to do that and thank you for your support. As a reminder, the recording for today's session will be available on the Tech Talks Community Dynamics page within five business days. I'd like to extend a big thank you to all of our presenters and thank you audience for logging in and joining us today.

Hello everybody, I'd like to welcome you to today's Dynamic 365 Tech Talk. Today's topic, Financial Reporting in Dynamics 365 Finance. My name is Janice and I'll be your moderator today.

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Our presenters will be responding to your questions during today's event and there should be some time at the end for further questions. I'd like to thank you for your patience during these announcements. Now on to the main event. Presenting for us today from Microsoft, we have R&D Solution Architect, Severin Bach.

We have Ginny Wong, who is a Senior Program Manager. And rounding out our presenter team today is Christopher Biesman, who is a Senior Software Engineer. So without any further delay, Severin, welcome and thanks for joining us. Thank you very much.

Hey. I'm Severin and I'm happy to talk about financial reporting today. Before I move into the content, I'd like to use the opportunity to pitch the brand new Dynamics 365 implementation guide. This is an asset we as a Fastbook team produced. It contains thousands of recommendations and things you should know when you'd like to implement Dynamics 365. I kindly ask you to check out the license guide.

it is available for you for free just follow the link we have here for you in the presentation thank you okay let's talk about financial reporting this is the agenda for today i will start with you know using financial reporting i will show you how to set up how to navigate how to open how to design after that i move over to chris chris will talk about the data mark and then i will take it back for for some lcs and troubleshooting insights all right so with that let's move on using financial reporting in the beginning i like to explain the use case of the feature so a financial accountant needs to create reports that will support the company in the month and close process so basically this is something every company needs to do at the month end and this financial reporting is helping you to solve the requirements in the area of consolidated financial reports the management reporting package you need to produce and generate for each month and for each year in closing maybe you need to report by subsidiary there are thousands of different requirements we do see and financial reporting is the feature to get that requirement solved Okay, so let's double click on that. Financial reporting allows financial and business professionals to create, maintain, deploy, and view financial statements. It moves beyond traditional reporting constraints to help you efficiently design various types of financial reports. Financial reporting includes dimension support, therefore account segments or dimensions are immediately available without additional tools or additional configuration.

To run a report, you need to use a report designer. This designer helps you to create, maintain, and use building blocks. I will double click on building blocks in a second.

And to generate a report, you can use report schedules or you can run a report ad hoc. please keep in mind it's about dimensions and account segments so we're talking about main accounts we're talking about financial dimensions this is about the general ledger transactions the financial reporting is not including subject to transactions keep that in mind that we're talking about the general ledger transactions the main ledger not the sub ledger all right with that i go double click on the components we have the financial reporting has two components. The report designer which helps you to combine building blocks to define a report, and the report schedules, which helps you to automate the report generation. So for example, if you have your month end, and normally you're done within the fourth day of the month, you can run the month end procedure, so to generate your report package automatically, that the reports are available and generated if you need it.

so that's basically the idea in special cases for sure you can go and and generate them manually i will demo that in a bit okay so what is a building block building blocks is the definition of the report so let's think about a report and with the report have to have some some kind of rows right we like to have rows on the on the report and we like to have columns and that's about building So a row definition defines the descriptive lines on the report. It lists the values that contain the values of each line item. It can include formatting and special calculation. So for example, a row can be just a value for a specific main account, or a row can be a calculation.

So summary of some rows you have above, as an example. You can go complex if you like, that's for sure. Column definition is about the columns you like to see on the paper or on the screen right the column is the name is a description of is maybe the account number a column definition is defining the period is this the period of the current month or is this the current period minus one which is the month before so or you like to go plus one looking into future when you have something that's actually posted for the next month already right so this is the column definition next to rows and columns we have reporting three definitions.

Reporting three definitions, think about the organizational hierarchy you have. Typically, there's a holding and the holding has a lot of subsidiaries, a lot of legal entities which sits below. You need to report based on that hierarchy. Sometimes you're on the first level, sometimes you go on the second, on the third.

It really depends on the requirement. Another example would be the financial dimension. hierarchy for example the cost centers you have or the combination of business units and related cost centers so with reporting trees you are able to run the reports like the proper laws of the balance sheet based on that reporting tree and you can go if you have the right security rights on that you can go and exit those on the second on the fourth level the beauty of financial reporting that the organization hierarchies you can go set up in financial report in the finance operations apps will be automatically moved over into the reporting service so this is kind of cool because you do need to maintain those twice and once you're updating on the hierarchy in financial based apps it will automatically update the reporting tree in the financial reporting so if we have a world and a column and reporting tree we can take all of them and we can combine it in a report definition which is at the end the report we like to generate so basically every row every column and every tweet definition can be used multiple times so that you do not have to have thousands of different column definitions you maybe have a 10 a 12 you know and then you can leverage them for your reports you need to generate all right next slide is about security so how you can access the financial reporting for this we have we have privileges available privileges to maintain financial reporter the reports right so that you can manage the security setup that's basically security administrator um then we have the privilege to maintain financial report itself um then there's a privilege which helps to generate financial reports and we do have a privilege available to view financial reports i kindly ask you to carefully take a look to the roles we have available and copy paste or consume them for your own security roles you are going to create in your implementation projects. It's major important to define which user, which role needs to use the financial reporting. If you'd like to learn more about the different security options available, please visit the blog post in this presentation.

Please find the link here on that page. It contains a lot of more insights on that security options and there's a quick YouTube video available as well. So check it out next is in general access to the server to the um to the service of the application you can go and restrict the access to a specific reporting unit let's go one step back so keep in mind that when you have the security setup in transfer rate is done and the user is only available to select this specifically the entity right this exam security setup on the legal entities will be reflected and it's relevant for the financial reporting as well so that we get this clarified Okay, and on top you can go restrict the access to the reporting unit.

So that's speaking the common business scenario are scenarios where Controllers should only access data of the business unit or cost center. They are responsible for so if I'm going to own The the auto sales right and I only should go and report on auto sales with restrict with extra restriction I can get that done. So this is major program and nice feature to take a look at so with that i will go and run the demo in the beginning i will show you you know a general introduction a little bit basic setup a little a little bit look and feel after that i will run with the designer and after that i will show you how to view how to generate how to navigate with a little bit more details all right so and with that i will change my screen and it will move into the um finance operation tabs so this is basically finance and operations and you will find the financial reporting sitting inside the general ledger module or you will find it in the budgeting module so everywhere where you need to have financial reports you can go and and open the the tool so let's click on general ledger and let's click on the financial reports here So that would be our starting point. Before we can use it, we need to take care that the financial reporting setup is done correctly.

So we have a lot of financial dimensions across a lot of legal entities. So we need to make sure that we go and select the financial dimensions we really need in our financial reporting. If there is no need for that financial dimension to be used in a financial report, please do not move it in.

That's about the performance impact. So... everything we do not need let's not move it over chris will talk about the architecture in the background why i'm by i'm saying here moving it over all right once the setup is done we can go and consume and can use the financial reports so this is the financial report overview you see here we have under control the database the default report report package so every implementation can go and consume it you can import it in every in every environment So with that you can really go and view a report. Yeah, just a quick one balance sheet. That's a report so you can go old school.

You can work in copy paste. I will go a little bit deeper during my next demo. Alright, so that's about the financial reporting inside F&O. And if you like to edit and create new reports, you need to click on that button here. Once you're clicking on the button.

you will see that an additional application will open and this additional application is this one right so looking at this application and it's this cloud service as well so you're downloading an application which is running on a laptop but basically it connects to our assets we have available in our cloud offering so you do not need to install something regular no admin needs to maintain it's all running automatically and i recommend to check the latest microsoft edge version or the latest Chrome and on the Chrome you need to have a specific edit installed which is available in the Chrome store for free. Alright, so in the application we do have segments. So we have segments for report definitions, row definition, column definition, reporting tree definitions. So you can go group reports together and you can schedule and you have some security setup available.

So that's basically our main menu and when we are sitting on the report definition we can go and double click on on the report. And that's our report definition. So as mentioned, the report definition is combining the backend setup we have or the backend definitions.

For example, rows, column, reporting trees, right? You can go and define, you know, what kind of company needs to be used, right? If you go for any, this report will be generated for any legal entity you have available.

If this report is just something where you like to use it for DE. and that you can go select and only in this entity the report will be available once generated So basically that's very simple. Forward we have additional setup available which could be which could drive a lot of complexity, but I don't like to overcomplicate that type of you. You can work on some on some out mechanism. You have the possibility to add some headers and fooders.

You can put in some images if you like and and we have some some settings so you can enable the rounding or it can move if you'd like to see. negative numbers with a minus or in brackets. You can work on the coloring if you like.

So this is the report definition. All right, let's take a look to our rows. So this is here a summary income statement.

So with this summary income statement, we have to have specific rows, and this is the row definition. So it's a table format. We have columns, so we have a row code which is very important. We have a description line.

and then we have here the format code and additional information and settings I can do for this row. For example, when I double-click here, you see you can define a row as total, as a complex calculation, as a description, as an underscore. You really can go and design your report in this tabular format.

For this scenario, I have here a line where I like to see some sales. Let's take a look to the right-hand side. This is a column.

which is linking to a financial dimension so that means i can here select all my financial dimensions which i have selected in the beginning you saw i have a lot of financial dimensions active therefore this is the very huge table here we do see main account categories so that means every main account will be used which sits in this main account category or you can define ranges as well or you can use multiple um you can use main accounts as well so it should be this one here if i'm not totally wrong oh that's that's a bank account financial dimension is got activated but somewhere here you will see the main account as well and and this is not that not that straightforward because we have too much values so i do recommend for you to create dimension sets that you are have your specific financial dimensions you need for the purpose of the you know for the purpose right if you go and create a specific report which needs cost centers and business unit select the main the dimension set which only have business unit and cost center included that you have a better overview so But basically this is how you go and design the rows. You need to describe what you like to see. This text will be auto-populated once you're entering a main account or main account category. This row code is important because let's take a look to the total.

So here we are saying, I like to summarize row 130 to 250. So look, those lines will be summarized. and therefore the row code is very much important so i kindly ask you really to to to have some space between those numbers that you're able to add new numbers afterwards once the report is what once the row definition is saved you can easily go copy paste um you know to move that roads into another row definition or you can export and import it if you're thinking about you know specific the stages from from dev test prod right because we don't like to do something abroad we always do tests and then we promote to prod but those um you know scenarios are very much supported all right so um next to the row definition we have the column definition and the column definition is okay the name is same column so it's defining the columns we like to have on the report so the same idea we have table structure um but it's a little bit upside down because from left to right we do have now the columns we'd like to see and the definitions and the setup is you know top down so you can define a specific column type this is here a description row or you can have some some um some column for the amount from a financial dimension um etc so basically here you see this here is a column which is using a financial dimension value it's using the actual um policy layer it's using the base financial year for the reporting date and the first period of that base that means if our financial calendar is starting from january to december our first period is january and the second period is february if your financial calendar is starting from july as you do in microsoft your first period will be july you know the 12th period would be june So this is a little bit tricky in the beginning, but you will get into it, that's for sure. So this is how you're designing and how you're defining which kind of period you'd like to enter, how much columns you'd like to have, and you can create here more columns to the right.

all right this is the um this is the column definition the report definition is is similar so let's go to report definitions and those are the organization hierarchies which are imported from finance operations apps let's take a look to the contoso holding um tree definition this is the organization hierarchy which is created it got created automatically for me and this year are some of the entities so the structure of the entities i do see so i'm not able to edit and move it away and this is maintained in finance operations apps directly and i could leverage this so this example as i shared at the beginning you can think more complex right and if you like you can create your custom um two definitions so something which is not maintained in finance and operations app which is not an organization hierarchy but is some combination and some hierarchy of financial dimensions you like to focus on so i kindly ask you to check it out i like that feature very much Alright, so that's about the designer presentation. So the introduction we did the designer I was explaining and the third demo part we have is about the generation and the view of financial reports. So let's go and generate a report manual.

i go and switch back to my designer you have the possibility to generate the report directly from the designer so if you're a designer and you're working on that you can go here and enjoy the report you can just generate it and then a new execution is starting you will see you have your queue and you can see what kind of steps will be executed and what the status so at the moment it's queuing so it's waiting for the service to come back now it's processing And once it's processing, it goes in, it loads the definition, it's executing the SQL statements on the data mart. Chris will talk about data mart. So we're not making noise on the finance operations apps.

You know, this financial reporting is only using data which sits in that data mart. Okay, now it is available, right? And I can go click here on the button, right, to see the view.

this is to see the report and i'm going directly into find splash apps and the ul is opening from for me and i'm sitting on the report i just generated right so that's the idea so you do not need to use a designer to generate a report you can go and generate a report basically directly from the user interface so this is the report we just created so you see the time this was me seconds ago right you can go and generate the report here So for users who don't have access to report designer, they are very welcome to use that user interface here. All right. If you don't like to generate that report manual, because this is your report which is working and you do need to cross-check and you're sure all transactions are in, at the point of generation, you can run report schedules. So let's create a report schedule here. You can.

select an individual report or you can select your report group so your financial package right and then you can define when i'd like to start the recurrence and if it's a daily weekly monthly execution right so with monthly and we can for example go on the force uh on the fourth weekday each month right or we can go on the last weekday in a month it really depends what you like to generate you are very much flexible on the um on the execution here right so that's once it's saved it's active the the the batching is running and it will generate the the reports in time automatically for you so you do not need to care about the manual um generation all right so let's go inside the um the reports so this is my report and as i said you can you can really use that report so you can scroll down and you scroll from left to right it's an interactive report you have so you can for example hide the headers if you like or you can hide the details and you only see the summaries if you like to do that you can zoom in and zoom out you have you know the possibility and that's amazing in my point of view to change the currency on the fly so you can go directly to europe's and you do have the possibility to have to have a separated exchange rate type so you can have a different change exchange rate if that is required or you have the same so that you really can can ensure that you're using the correct um change exchange rates right when you're changing that um currencies on the fly right so let's go back and now it's using it's recalculating in the in the correct um In the correct currency right next to that currency opportunity you are able to export the report into Excel right and with Excel. The cool thing is that you're not getting just the values you are. You're getting the totals as well, right?

So this is calculating right now. Let's give it a second and then it's here. So now we are sitting here on yours right?

I think that's kind of fast what we just saw, so it's happening on the fly. If you'd like to change between currencies, that's fantastic feature. when you go and export you really can can can define what you like to export and then you're getting an entire express sheet and it's not containing just values it contains the the formulas as well in excel so if you're defining a summary sum of a specific row right this logic those um formulas will be moved into excel as well that it's easy for you to adjust and to move forward if you like um for sure you can go and print um but you know since we are digital No, I think printing is not that often happening, so really use that display feature here. On report options, you can go and add additional filters. So for example, if you really like to filter on a specific cost center or on a specific main account, you can go and define that filter and then the report rows will be reduced.

The next cool feature I'd like to present you is the possibility to drill down. So let's assume we like to learn more about what's inside this sales row and what happened in march so i can click down on march and with that i do see what's inside we have product sales we have you know product sales homes that basically some some main accounts which are sitting below and i can add the possibility to go to the next level so i can really drill down into the into the details and here i have a possibility to drill down to the report transaction level let's do that so this is double clicking on that line and now would you see the the transactions in detail which got posted i think that's that's another report um the details um um there's a different report um i can i can show that for the for the business for the balance sheet in a bit um so but anyway what i like to show you is here you can go and open trans open account transactions so that means with one click we are going into the form where we do see account transactions. So now we are sitting not in the financial reporting anymore, we are sitting directly in the user interface, which is allowing us to deep dive on the voucher to understand, you know, the original transactions to settle the settlements, the audit trail, what kind of original document is used. So that's amazing.

So with financial reporting, you have the possibility to get reports done. you have a lot of details you can interactively drill down into details and you can jump you can jump into the is the general ledger transactions to really start exploring where this transaction is coming from if you like to understand details so um that's pretty awesome the next example i'd like to show you is the example about the um reporting pre-definition let's double click on the benefit so here's a different report i produced for you and this viewport is using um is using the um the reporting trees before we do that let me show you the the drill down on on uh which which wasn't in the report before right here i'm now on the third level and with that i just see here the posting right the transactions on the which happened on the combination of the um of the um mini constructor right so that i'm not talking something which is not working and okay balance sheet this report this balance sheet report is having in the background the um reporting tree in use so let's take a look at the reporting definition the report definition and here we do see we have here the um organization hierarchy selected and i i entered the controls of holding right reporting tree Remember, this is maintaining fine separations, which gets synchronized and we can directly use it. Let's move to the report again.

You see here's a button. You can click on that and you can really go and change into the details very quickly. So let's take a look to the postings which happened for Germany.

Or if you'd like to go on the USA, that's no problem. So I can drill down, I can really select the specific level. or like to go on the controls entertainment systems only then i do see and i'm getting some of them right this is a fantastic feature how it can easily you know report based on an organization hierarchy based on a hierarchy which is about business unit and cost centers or department there are a lot of different requirements and this is the amazing functionality i like a lot so um that's about my my demo and with that i move over to the presentation again And I will overhand to Jeannie. Jeannie, are you there?

Yeah, I'm here. Thank you, Severin. So with all that we've seen with Report Designers, there are a couple of issues that we do want to talk about. You may face when trying to open Report Designer, especially if it's your first time. There may be times when Report Designer doesn't start when you select New or Edit, or if the user who is using Report Designer hasn't been assigned...

the required or correct permissions to use financial reporting. You also may see situations where you can't proceed past the Click Once report designer sign-in page. So you can get to the sign-in page, but you cannot complete the sign-in.

So instead of going through all of that in painful detail, we went ahead and created a great doc with troubleshooting issues. It will be included in this deck that will be made available to you after this session. Can we go to the next slide, please? So we do want to talk about reporting performance.

I think this is always a topic when in any kind of reporting. When running reports in financial reporting, you have great flexibility and capability to run reports down to the transaction detail like we saw from what Stephen just showed us. But with this great capability, the awareness needs to be there that running large reports with many rows and columns can sometimes cause delays in performance of slow running reports. And so we want to highlight some examples of what may cause these delays so that you're aware of them when you're designing your reports.

The first one is adding a large number of dimensions and Severin had gone through that earlier in looking at the types of dimensions you can add in and he cautioned that you should select dimensions that you know you need to report on. For example, if you're doing segment reporting by Business unit, you want to make sure to include that, but if you have a dimension for location that maybe you don't need, you would want to exclude that. Also, adding attributes from accounts payable and accounts receivable to a single report can also slow down reports.

Now, these capabilities do exist and can be used. This is merely to inform you of what might be slowing down your performance. The second thing is historical currency translations. we usually recommend using this only for retained earnings equity and long-term liabilities and i was reminded yesterday sometimes they're also used in fixed assets um historical currency translations cause a slowdown because what the system is doing is going back and looking at every single day and looking at the currency exchange rate for that transaction for that day and calculating it so that does cause a little bit of a delay as you can imagine The third thing is tree design.

You know, there were three components to the building blocks of a report and the third one is a tree design. Now, how I like to explain this one is when you create a report with many levels in a tree, and I believe the example we saw earlier had 11 levels in the tree. And when you have a report with say 20 columns and 50 rows, then, and you have a tree with maybe 20 units in the tree. you're actually creating a report with a thousand fields, right?

Some of which may be calculations 20 times. So it does take time. So consider that when you're running a report with many levels in a tree as that can be performance affecting. Finally, of course, running reports in transaction detail. You know, as you know, there may be some accounts in your chart of accounts that has many transactions and might take a little bit longer.

And so be aware that when you're choosing to run a report in transaction detail, that if you are including those specific accounts that may have lots of in and outs or lots of transactions, that that could also potentially cause delays. Great. I thank you for your time.

I'm going to pass it off to Chris to talk about the data mart. Thanks, Jenny. So I'm going to take a few minutes to discuss the data mart and how it's used for reporting. First, let's start with a little bit of detail on how the back end of financial reporting looks. You can see a little bit of an architectural overview here.

There are two main services for financial reporting. We have the application service and the process service towards the right of the diagram. The application service is interactive and it responds when you're making requests from either the ClickOnce report designer or when you're interacting with the financial reports on the web pages.

This service stores and retrieves data from the financial reporting database for your use. The other service on the lower right is the process service. It's not interactive and it acts sort of like a batch.

It processes the jobs for report generation or for the data integration. It brings metadata from the AOS and financial data from the operational database into the data mart for use in financial reporting. So on to a little bit of detail about the data mart itself. Next slide. So the data mart like we mentioned is used to generate reports.

It's using data that's synced from the general ledger and the financial tables into the data mart and we run the reports against this data mart in order to avoid excess load on the online database change tracking is used to improve the performance of the sync through incremental loads and we make use of a system account in order to gather metadata from the aos service so particularly the fr service user account This account is only used to communicate between financial reporting and the AOS services. You can find a little more detail about pre-configured system accounts on the doc link provided in the slide deck. So next slide. Since the data mart is a copy of the operations data, it's possible to reset the data mart if it becomes out of sync. A reset is going to clear all the data that came from operations.

but it will maintain the things that you created in Report Designer, such as your report designs, your user groups, or your report schedules that we talked about. Generally speaking, a data mart reset isn't going to be needed to be done manually. All the automated processes that you would start from LCS will include the reset if it's needed. So for example, when you refresh databases from production to sandbox for testing purposes, the two databases are copied in sync so there's no need for a data mart reset or if you're importing an ax database alone then the reset will be automatically performed as part of the lcs process an exception to this might be if you're working with a development environment where you're doing some of these operations manually in that case you might need to do a reset to keep things in sync Please reach out to support if you find the need to perform a data mart reset outside of a case where you've gotten these two databases out of sync. For example, if you find that you keep needing to run resets to fix data on your reports, this is a sign that we need to investigate a product issue and we'd like to know about it.

So our goal is to keep the data mart integration as seamless as possible. There's a little bit more details on the doc link provided on this slide. So we can go on to the last slide here. So when you do perform a data mart reset, it's a fairly simple process. You'll initiate the reset from report designer.

There the dialogues are going to walk you through the options and warn you about the amount of downtime you may have for financial reporting. The amount of time it takes to bring the data back into the data mart depends on the number of financial transactions that you have. and also the dimension combinations.

So as mentioned earlier, the reporting dimensions that you select will impact the performance of the system in that case. For example, if you have 100,000 transactions, you'll probably take less than an hour to do a data mart reset. Or if you have something like 100 million transactions, it's likely to take a few hours.

The reset itself takes place in two phases. First, all the data are removed from the data mart, and this is when you'll wait for a response on the reset dialog. After that, the data integrations are restarted to load the data as it can be read from the databases.

The integration status is shown in the subsequent dialogs during the designer resets. You can check the documentation for more information on that as well. With that, I'll hand it back to Severin to close us out. Thanks Chris.

At the end I'd like to touch base on the LCS and the troubleshooting. If you're, you know, keep in mind we have regular environment downtimes since we have to do some system maintenance and each time we have a downtime in the environment for system maintenance so every couple of weeks we go and deploy the latest and greatest functionality for financial reporting so the data mart and reporting application i presented to you right so each downtime you're getting the latest and greatest if if you need to get an update quicker because you're facing some kind of issue right you do see those fixes available on the lts issue search and you can consume those fixes by just deploying the latest and greatest cumulative um quality updates so it will go and deploy the latest and greatest on your finance operations apps and will move the updates into the financial reporting as well so this is very much straightforward keep in mind every downtime mair or financial reporting will be updated and if you'd be to be if you'd like to be quicker then you're more than welcome to consume the data's greatest quality updates to get these fixes deployed to your service. So that's all on the LCS and troubleshooting. It's kind of straightforward and with that we are at the end of our presentation and we have now time for Q&A.

There are a couple of questions and thank you very much for those questions. It's very important that we do know what questions keeps you awake. so please continue to drop the questions and we're working on the answering in the background so um jeannie do you like to um rephrase some questions which are reported for you or is that something you'd like to add um sure i think i could answer the question on does microsoft have any plans to run financial reporting on power bi we currently have a power bi embedded solution that's already available. Financial reporting is a tool in itself that's separate from that, so I hope that answers your question like that.

And then I can take this other one, is how can you consolidate reports in Financial Reporter when some of your legal entities use the online consolidation functionality? So if I understand correctly, that means you have... some of your consolidations happening in online consolidations, but you need to consolidate those companies into additional companies for maybe an all-up consolidation. You can reference the consolidated company in your financial reporting report and do your consolidations that way. And then is it possible when we drill to show only main account and not the full account with dimensions on the transaction level.

I don't believe that's possible 7 and Chris. Would you like to weigh in on that? I'm on the same, so I think of the account structure you see if I'm not totally mistaken, but if this is a blocking thing right, reach out to support or you know, feel free to contact us directly that we can help.

to move forward if this is a blocking thing in your in your project and i think the first there's another question is how are the financial dimensions incorporated into that particular report i am not sure which reports are seven maybe is this one that you could take No, I missed the details on that question. So what report are you referring to? So, I mean, financial dimensions can be brought in on the row or the column level.

So you can always filter by financial dimension. If you're looking at, for example, if you're looking at a P&L and you would like to have a profit and loss by financial dimensions, you can definitely put that in the column. I hope that helps answer that question a little bit. great any other questions i think there's there was an important one for for kind of um huge dynamics between c5 finance operations deployments um so do we like to yeah so i mean we definitely have customers with millions of lines of data again it's not about the amount of data it's really about how the report is written and that's why when we brought up the topic earlier You know if you're bringing in a report and you're trying to report on multiple, maybe multiple dimensions across columns, and so maybe you have 30, 40, 50 columns and in a report and then you run that report within a tree with another 20 or 30 units. So that can take a while.

So it's not about how much data and of course eventually when there's a large amount of data and I'll let Chris expand on that more. but it's all about how the report is written. So financial reporting can definitely handle data with millions of records in the GL.

It's really all in how the report is written. So report design is very important. There's a new question on the exchange rate. so this is um this is where you can have a dedicated exchange rate type on the main account you will find the setup where you can define that exchange rate type so that you have a specific exchange rate type for the financial reporting feature um jeannie there's a question about the the workspace for the cfo overview which we have in power bi and the question is of this workspace is based on the reports in financial reporting i think it's a clear no right we have the financial reporting as an as a feature which is using the data mark and then in parallel we do have a couple of workspaces where we do have available dashboards and those dashboards are sitting based on the on the equity measurements we have available right so aggregate measurements um are the basic baseline for the copy of dashboards you will see embedded right so it's not using that reports because at the end we only have reports templates available for user to default reports we don't have you know any out of the box report to get this balance sheet done or this problem loss sheet done right so that's basically important it's really up to each project to leverage the templates and go adjust um to fit your requirements and that's basically the same for the workspaces as well so you're starting from our point of view and then you can go and extend you can add columns you can shape it to make it look better There's a question about financial sets created in F&O. Yeah, I'm thinking you, I think you're talking about financial sets you can define on a trade balance in F&O where you can go and have a trade balance available in a form.

No, these financial dimension sets will be not moved over into the financial reporting. In financial reporting you're defining your own financial sets because it's just, you know, the way how you're grouping but there's no pre-calculation. happening in financial reporting there's no integration between it's really to help the end users or the designer to select the right dimension set the dimensions and they do not need to use that entire list if you only have five dimensions you know there's no need for you to to work on on dimension sets the benefit of dimension sets and fno is that you can run you know you can run the calculations right you can sum and you can consolidate on the financial dimension sets regular so that you can when you can go and open the trade balance the amount and the totals are calculated because the batch work the batch job was executed at night so that's the benefit of the financial dimension sets that the totals are pre-calculated that the end users do not need to click on the button and i kindly ask you to pre-calculate because you know when you're calculating every time the interviews are starting that form in the in the finance operations apps it takes a while so really leverage the batch up setting we haven't we we moved a lot of fixes in the past so you will see a lot of improvement um we did due to the number of transactions we see in the projects yeah genius there another question you'd like to answer verbally or christopher do Something where you can talk about. Looks like we're getting quite a few questions about exchange rates and seven. Have you do you have any examples that you could share?

Maybe if you're using different exchange rates in the same chart of accounts that you've maybe built. Yeah, go ahead. The the the change rate will be useful in the management reporter, which is on the main account, right? So the main accounts is the main account is available. and on each main account you can go and define the change rate which gets used on the financial reporting right and this setup cannot be you know um changed uh on the legal empty right there are only a few setups you can change on the entity level for example you can pause or you can you can you can suspend the main account or you can have some some additional settings but as far as i know you know the change rate type I cannot change on the legal entity level.

If I'm not totally mistaken right now, I can. I can check that. Yeah, they are notes available on the on the dimension sets, but again it's it's straightforward.

It is just about going to the sets and you can select. That's, I think, not that rocket science. So just feel free to explore the dimension sets in the user interface directly in the management reporting.

Yeah, you can't have multiple exchange rates on a main account for... for uh for months and um so there's only one you you to use um checkout docs for the exchange rate types there's a lot of information you can find okay i think with that um we are done with that tech talk oh that's a good question here we have a question about the um the xpl taxonomy in the financial reporting are you aware about this this area or is this something we would like to cover offline yeah let me take this one offline i actually um it's an interesting question i've never looked into it before um i will go ahead and respond to it thank you okay so maria please please contact directly uh we're more than happy to to talk offline about that feature All right, Janice. All right, thank you, Severin. All right, everyone, I would like to take a moment here and bring your attention to a link that I just posted in the Q&A panel. That is a link to a short survey for this web conference.

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Transcript for:Financial Reporting Overview in Dynamics 365

Transcript for:
Financial Reporting Overview in Dynamics 365