Business Intelligence
Businesses capture a tremendous amount of data through daily activity. This data, which reflects such things as the organization's sales figures, purchases, operational expenses, employee salaries, and budgets, can become valuable information, or business intelligence, for decision makers. Business Central contains a number of features that help you gather, analyze, and share your company data.
The Dimensions functionality plays an important role in business intelligence. A dimension is data that you can add to an entry as a kind of marker. This data is used to group entries with similar characteristics, such as customers, regions, products, and salesperson, and easily retrieve these groups for analysis. Among other uses, you use dimensions when defining analysis views and when creating account schedules for reporting. For more information, see Working with Dimensions.
Tip
As a quick way to analyze transactional data by dimensions, you can filter totals in the chart of accounts and entries in all Entries pages by dimensions. Look for the Set Dimension Filter action.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
| To | See |
|---|---|
| View actual amounts compared to budgeted amounts for all accounts and for several periods. | Analyze Actual Amounts Versus Budgeted Amounts |
| Create new account schedules to define financial statements for reporting or for display as charts. | Prepare Financial Reporting with Account Schedules and Account Categories |
| Analyze your financial performance by setting up KPIs based on account schedules, which you then publish as web services. The published account-schedule KPIs can be viewed on a web site or imported to Microsoft Excel using OData web services. | Set Up and Publish KPI Web Services Based on Account Schedules |
| Set up analysis views to analyze data using dimensions. | Analyze Data by Dimensions |
| Create new analysis reports for sales, purchases, and inventory, and set up analysis templates. | Create Analysis Reports |
| Enable global financial reporting by to international accounting organizations with the eXtensible Business Reporting Language standard. | Create Reports with XBRL |
| Change the database access intent on reports, pages of the type API, and queries to reduce load and improve performance. | Manage Database Access Intent |
See Also
Finance
Using Business Central as a Power BI Data Source
Closing Fiscal Periods
Importing Data from Other Finance Systems
Working with Business Central