Financial Reporting Data Mart for Dynamics SL – Management Reporter RU4

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With the success of the data mart we offer for AX 2012, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics GP customers, we are now excited to offer it to Dynamics SL 2011 customers using Management Reporter. The option will appear in the Custom Configuration as shown in the following screen shot.

  

 

Your first question may be what is a data mart and why would I want to consider it? The data mart uses the existing Management Reporter server and client to connect to a data mart that holds the necessary financial data needed for financial reporting. This data mart uses a trickle method to continuously move data from Dynamics to the data mart. Here is a link to a Management Reporter blog that answers frequently asked questions on the data mart.

The primary benefits to Dynamics SL customers using the data mart will be:  

  • Company integration – companies are imported into the data mart when they are created in Dynamics SL. You no longer need to manually set them up or import them.
  • Performance enhancements – the data mart is optimized for financial reporting. Although each report is designed uniquely and may vary, many reports may see performance improvements.
  • Ability to report on inactive companies – the data mart allows users to report on companies that are no longer being used for transactional posting, but are still needed for historical reporting.

For existing Dynamics SL Management Reporter customers, there is a change to Dimension Names with the data mart. Dimensions are named differently and require updates to the row, column, and reporting tree definitions.  For example, in the SL legacy provider the main account was ‘Natural’, in the data mart is titled ‘Account’. Customer Support has a diagnostic tool to assist with this change. Please contact Support for assistance with synchronizing the dimension names in your Management Reporter 2012 reports with your Dynamics SL data mart database. 

We encourage all users to adopt the data mart and take advantage of the capabilities as it is the current and only future architecture that will be supported. We hope you are excited about the offering of the data mart for Dynamics SL.