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:
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):
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:
01905902
, London Candoxy Storage Campus
customer, and click on the Dimensions/Dimensions-single icon on the ribbon bar. The Default Dimensions page opens.
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:
01905902
, London Candoxy Storage Campus
.
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.