The best low TCO recipe for your Business Central reports.

The number of resources spent on reports during a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation often comes as a surprise to customers. After all, BC does come with a number of different off-the-shelf reports, including:

·??????? Key Financial Reports

·??????? Accounts Receivable Reports

·??????? Accounts Payable Reports

·??????? Sales Reports

·??????? Purchase Reports

·??????? Inventory and Warehouse Reports

·??????? Project Reports

·??????? Fixed Assets Reports

·??????? Assembly Reports

·??????? Production Reports

This should be more than enough to cover the needs of most BC customers. However, reports can be one of the reasons why many BC implementations go over budget.

Why using the standard reports in Business Central often becomes a high-cost hassle.

Using the standard reports and reporting tools available in Business Central comes with several significant limitations:

1. While report customization is almost always a must – working with the BC reporting tools is far from easy. The list of out-of-the-box BC documents and reports is long and somewhat impressive, however, very few companies can use this list without some level of customization – from the insertion of logos, watermarks, or special characters to reflect their corporate identity to the use of barcodes or QR codes. In Business Central, these simple report modifications require the work of seasoned developers, trained to work in RDLC.
2. The creation of new reports is just as difficult. Building reports from scratch in Business Central is often a disliked task for BC developers. In fact, creating new RDLC reports in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central typically involves a mix of design work and coding, in particular if you want to go beyond very simple layout changes and include more advanced features or dynamic content.
3. Upgrades can become a nightmare and keeping maintenance costs down is an impossible mission. The report customizations done by Business Central partners could potentially be endangered by upgrades to newer versions of Business Central – potentially resulting in additional development costs to keep reports working in the long run.
4. Finding qualified resources to work with BC reporting can be a struggle. Mastering report and document design in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central involves a learning curve, and it can be difficult to find resources that have the skills to do report design for Business Central – and ever trickier to find some that actually feel like it.

Because it is such a difficult task, creating, customizing, and maintaining BC reports and documents often requires many hours of coding from specialized resources that have spent a considerable amount of time learning it. This often results in sky-high costs - also long term and therefore a high total cost of ownership (TCO). A situation that can be hard to explain to customers.

There is a solution that makes BC document creation and customization a simple job.

As shown above, reports creation, customization and maintenance in Business Central can easily become resource-intensive or cost-prohibitive, taking the total cost of ownership of these reports (and to some extent of your BC implementation) to new heights. That is why FORNAV is offering a simpler, more effective solution: one that simplifies and speeds up the report and document creation and customization process in Business Central.

Here are a few great things about FORNAV:

• It comes out of the box with close to 100 standard reports that work out of the box and can easily be customized. How are they better than the standard Business Central reports? They have undergone a thorough code clean-up that makes them easy, simple, and fast to customize – without the need for coding.
• It makes tricky tasks in BC (for example inserting watermarks, labels, QR codes, barcodes, or even using embedded fonts) so simple that even less experienced resources can perform them.
• Its designer is an intuitive tool that does not require intensive training to master. It is simple and fast to learn, even for less seasoned employees.
• Creating tailored, professional-looking reports does not require touching a single line of code.
• It includes a dynamic dataset, which means that you do not have to define data sets each time you want to create or modify a report.
• Its simple interface lets you drag and drop the fields you want to include in your reports.
• Its master section technology lets you use sections from existing reports as templates in new reports. You can create new reports easily, and, when you update the master section, all reports using it are automatically updated.
• It is the best long-term solution to make sure that your customized BC documents and reports will always work, as they are built to support all future versions of Business Central.

FORNAV lets you ensure a low the TCO of your BC reports and documents by cutting development and customization costs and keeping long term maintenance costs low. It is an all-in-one solution that also includes tools to let you seamlessly create and exchange e-invoices, access local files and tools, and even print reports directly from the web client on any type of device, to any network printer. It is a relatively small investment that could prove highly beneficial, giving back much more than the initial cost.