Best Practices for GL Reports

Overview

Reporting Intelligence offers the user a great deal of design flexibility.

Using Excel's formatting capability, you can have almost unlimited potential for determining how your reports will look.

You also have a great deal of flexibility on how you use the Reporting Intelligence Excel add-in's capabilities to find and display the data for your report.

There are certain techniques, however, that work better (and faster) than others. As an example, let's look at a simple G/L-Balance report.

Examples

1. Static Report - slower

   One common type of report is what is call a "Static Report".  In a static report, much of the information is already entered in the report by hand, and then other information is drawn from the database.

   In this example:

   

   All of the account numbers and names we are wanting to see have been entered by hand.  Then, the Reporting Intelligence GL() function has been used to just compute the current balance of each account from our NAV 2013 data source.  Running this report would result in one query being sent to that data source for each account displayed in our report.

   Before we run this report, let's look at another way we could design it so that we can compare the two methods.

2. Replicating Report - faster

   In this example, a Reporting Intelligence NL("Rows") function has been used to gather all the account numbers we want to see :

   

   In the next column, w e get the name of each of those accounts:

   

   And finally, j ust as in the Static example, the GL() function is used to compute the current balance of the account.

   

   Each line of this example involves three separate Reporting Intelligence functions [one each of: NL(Rows), NL(First), and a GL() function].

   Given that this example uses 3 Reporting Intelligence functions for each account (as compared to 1 Reporting Intelligence function for the Static example), you would probably expect this method to take 3 times as long to run as the Static example.

3. Optimization

   Excel and most databases - including Dynamics NAV - are able to perform calculations very quickly.  Much of the time involved in reporting is taken up by the communications between the database and the reporting tool that is requesting the information.

   Reporting Intelligence (version 2013 and higher) includes a "Function Optimization" feature that is able to optimize various aspects of Replicating-type reports in order to minimize the amount of data that has to flow back and forth between Reporting Intelligence and the NAV data source.

4. Comparison

Conclusion

The combination of Reporting Intelligence and Excel provides you with great flexibility for how to design your reports.

Keep in mind, however, that some design strategies work better than others.