Third-party solutions

All the solutions we have discussed so far are either included with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 or available as additional software from Microsoft. However, if you want to work with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Microsoft Excel, there are also a number of third-party solutions available. Selecting a third-party solution can be a challenging proposition.

It seems like every vendor remotely connected to reporting and Excel has put out what they term a Business Intelligence (BI) solution for Dynamics GP. Microsoft even referred to FRx, the financial reporting forerunner to Management Reporter, as a Business Intelligence solution. This may be technically true, but when you say "Business Intelligence", the average user thinks of a dashboard, not a financial reporting package.

The market has finally shaken out into a few categories with a lot of overlap. The options break down into reporting solutions that can produce dashboards, generally known as Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions, and more dashboard-focused solutions that can produce financial reports. For our purposes, I'm labeling all of these solutions as Business Intelligence. It's really about where the vendor places the emphasis.

Additionally, the choices break down into those that report directly off data in Dynamics GP, those that use a just a data warehouse, and those that use OLAP cubes for their underlying data sources.

The continuum for costs and sophistication generally break down the same way. Solutions that report directly off of GP data tend to be the least sophisticated and the cheapest. Solutions using a cube tend to be more expensive and more powerful. To help, I've pulled together a list of common, third-party reporting solutions. There are other CPM and BI solutions available for Dynamics GP 2013, but since this book is focused on Excel, I've only included solutions that are Excel-focused:

Here are some BI options:

For the purposes of this book, we use the term "data warehouse". Some vendors use the term "data mart". Generally, a data mart is a specific subset of information in a data warehouse. For example, we might have a data warehouse of operational and financial information but we segregate just the vendor and AP information into a data mart for use by the purchasing group. Vendors seem to use them interchangeably with little regard for specific definitions, so for this book, we will use the term data warehouse for both.

The techniques shown in this book work pretty much the same whether you are reporting off a live connection to Dynamics GP, a data warehouse, or a multidimensional cube. Live reporting provides instant gratification. The use of a data warehouse improves the ability to scale reporting without increasing the load on the Dynamics GP server.