Smart Start #2: Financial Reporting in the New Microsoft Dynamics AX
There has been much speculation as to what “Management Reporter” will be in the new Microsoft Dynamics AX (previously referred to as AX7). The bottom line is that it is still there. Financial Reporting (aka Management Reporter) provides the ability to generate reports and retrieve data with built in general ledger reports. It has changed a bit in this new version, but “an apple is still an apple”.
In AX2012 the user went to a link within the General Ledger Reports area and once selected, they were taken to the “Management Reporter” application. They did everything from there – creating, editing, generating, viewing, etc.
In the new Dynamics AX, the user navigates to General Ledger > Inquiries and Reports > Financial Reporting. Once they get to that page they immediately notice that there are 22 predefined reports available. These reports are ready to roll and include Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Detailed (and Summary) Trial Balance Report, Cash Flow, Ratios, and others.
So, how is this done? It’s all based on “main account categories”. You may be wondering if it is now a “required” field – it is not. You can create a new main account and not be required to populate that field. It is important to specify a main account category on each main account as you set up Dynamics AX. However, if for some reason you did not, don’t worry, you can always go to the main account category page, select the category that you want to link main accounts to and select the “Link Main Accounts” button to do a mass update.
Additionally, I have seen that folks have wanted to categorize things in their financial reports based on some other logic than the categories predefined in the system. You can still do that by creating additional main account categories.
However it should be noted, that obviously these will not be configured in the “row definition” that Microsoft created and used as a default in all of the out of the box reports. You can still make those changes in AX though. You would simply have to update your row definition so that you are using the newly created main account category(s). To do that, a user with appropriate rights would need to access the row definition and make those adjustments.
More updates on the new Dynamics AX Financial Reporting will be in a future article.