Who doesn’t want more – or better – reports? The good news is that Microsoft keeps improving the reporting abilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. But here are a few tips for making the most out of what’s available as of Q4 2019.
One of the current options is that you can create Account schedules. These are like your typical P&L or balance sheets with accounts as your rows and time periods as your columns. You can also open a list in Excel (sort of static listing of any view that you have) and then manipulate it as you would like. Or, you can use Odata reports, which are is similar to using Excel but now you have a real-time refreshable list. Then there are forms like invoice reports or sales order acknowledgement, purchase order, etc. In this blog post I’ll cover the concept of customizing your Word form or your invoice report layouts.
If you search for Custom Report Layouts, you will see a listing of all the custom reports in Business Central. These are built-in reports and have not been customized yet. You can select the built-in report that you want to customize and use that as a starting point to create your own custom report layout. Under ‘Type’ if it has ‘Word’, then generally a non-technical person can make some basic changes to this report.
For example, if you want to customize your sales invoice report, select the built-in invoice report that you want to customize. Click on Layout > Export Layout. It will open the sales invoice in word. If you run it, you can see what these values are and if you go to ‘Developer’ tab and the ‘XML Mapping Pane’, there are a lot of fields available at the Header level, Line level and Subtotal level. If you are familiar with Word, it’s straightforward, using tables and dragging and dropping. You can move the fields around, put a different logo or enter a different text box. The important thing is to enable the Developer tab in word.
Once you customize the form, save it. And then go the same place from where you exported the layout previously and then click on ‘Import Layout’. The next time you print an invoice, it will use your updated format. You can learn about the layout that is currently used on your report by searching for Report Layout Selection and then clicking on the Selected Layout.
If you would like to know about Odata reporting in Business Central, stay tuned for our next blog post.
New Features in October 2019 Release
Get to know some of the new features in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central October 2019 release here.
If you would like to know about Tensoft and how it can help you, visit our website.
- By Jason Ochipa, Tensoft, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner