So far we have seen the data entry and data process side of Dynamics NAV in the previous chapters. Once data is introduced into the system, you should be able to analyze it.
Are our departments generating value for the company? Which items or services are the most profitable? What area is experiencing a bigger sales growth? Analysis and reporting can help you to answer these questions.
In this chapter, we will see the tools available to analyze Dynamics NAV data, both inside and outside the application. This chapter covers the following topics:
- Dimensions
- Filters, charts, and statistics
- Reports
- Account schedules
- Analysis views
- Business Intelligence with Excel and PowerPivot
The term dimension is used to describe how analysis occurs. A two-dimensional analysis, for example, would be sales per area. In a more complex scenario, we could also analyze sales per sales campaign, per customer group, and per area.
In order to be able to analyze those dimensions you have to make sure that each and every single entry contains the information needed. In Dynamics NAV, a dimension can be seen as information linked to an entry, such as a tag or a characteristic. The purpose of dimensions is to group entries with similar characteristics so that you can report on the data in a way that is meaningful to the company.
You can define your own dimensions according to how you need to analyze your data. Each dimension can have unlimited dimension values that are subunits of the dimension. For example, a dimension called Department can have subunits called Sales, Administration, and so on. These departments are dimension values.
In Dynamics NAV, you can create unlimited dimensions. However, there are some restrictions on how to access their information. We can group dimensions in three categories, according to their access level (how easy is to access them):
- Global dimensions: It is very easy to access and filter on them. We can use up to two global dimensions.
- Shortcut dimensions: You need to open a separate page to access them. On some occasions, they are shown on the page's journal and document pages to make it easier to introduce them. We can use up to eight shortcut dimensions. Two of them correspond to global dimensions.
- The rest of the dimensions: You always need to open a separate page to introduce or see them.
Imagine you want to analyze your sales according to the size of your customers. You create a dimension called CUSTOMERGROUP and you define different dimension values such as LARGE, MEDIUM, and SMALL.
One customer might only be a part of one of those groups, so you inform him/her as a default dimension for the customer. You can do this using the following steps:
- Navigate to Departments | Sales & Marketing | Sales | Customers.
- Select the
01905902,London Candoxy Storage Campuscustomer, and click on the Dimensions/Dimensions-single icon on the ribbon bar. The Default Dimensions page opens. - Create a new line for the CUSTOMERGROUP dimension, as shown in the following screenshot:
Now, every time you post a new invoice for the customer or use the customer in documents or journals, the default dimensions defined will be used.
On some occasions, the default dimensions are not enough and you need to inform about dimensions on single documents or on single journal lines. Let's see it with an example:
- Create a new sales invoice for customer
01905902,London Candoxy Storage Campus. - Click on the Dimensions icon found on the ribbon bar. The Dimension Set Entries page opens.
- The default dimensions defined for the customer and the salesperson have already been transferred to the document. Create a new line for the SALESCAMPAIGN dimension, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once you post the invoice, all the resulting entries will have all four dimensions associated to it.
In the example, we have set dimension values for the entire document, but it is also possible to set dimension values at the document-line level.