I have worked with several D365FinOps customers to design and develop reporting and analytical solutions as part of their D365FinOps implementations. I found it quite interesting that many customers know what solutions are available but are unsure how they work, what they are best for, and how to implement them.

This blog post will explain a few standard reporting and analytics solutions or components, what they are best for, and what is involved in implementing them.

Operational View (Part 1)
Document Reporting (SSRS) (Part 1)
Financial Reporting (Part 2)
Electronic Reporting (Part 3)

Financial Reporting

Purpose	Financial reporting for the application allows financial and business professionals to create, maintain, deploy, and view financial statements. It moves beyond traditional reporting constraints to help you efficiently design various types of reports.
Development Effort	Low.
Development Skill Set	D365 Report Designer skills and understanding of business financial reporting.

Financial Reporting is an OOTB reporting tool that comes as part of the D365FO application. It primarily gives financial business users a way to design and develop financial reports in the D365 application and run them ad hocly or on a schedule.

There are a list of pre-defined financial reports available OOTB, and the users can use these reports as templates to create their reports with slightly different reporting period, financial dimensions and attributes, or main account structures.

Generate the Reports

Financial Reporting can be accessed from the following locations:

General Ledger > Inquiries and reports
Budgeting > Inquires and reports > Basic budgeting
Budgeting > Inquiries and reports > Budget planning
Budgeting > Inquiries and reports > Budget control

Once the “Financial reports” is opened, many default financial reports are shown as below:

Select one report from the left tree view, then click “Generate” from the menu bar, it will prompt with a “Report date” parameter to execute the financial report.

We will take a look at the first default report “12 Month Rolling Single Column Income Statement – Default” as an example. We choose “Report date” to be 31/01/2015 as the sample data from “Contoso Retail USA” in the D365 development enviroment has data for this period. When running this report in your enviroment, you can select a date relevant to your business, and the report will show the income statement for the 12 months up to the selected date.

Once clicked OK, the system will generate the report in the backgroup. The report will appear on the form:

Select one generated report and click the “View” button, the report content will be displayed:

Also, we can click the “Report Options” button to fliter the report by attributres and/or dimensions.

The available attributes and dimensions can be confgirued from

General Ledger > Ledger setup > Financial reporting setup

Design and Development

On the main “Financial report” form, click the “New” or “Edit” button, and the web browser will download the “ReportDesigner.application”, namely the “Financial Report Designer” application. Please note that if Chrome is used for the download, the “ReportDesigner.application” may give the following error when opening:

System.Deployment.Application.InvalidDeploymentException (Zone)
– Deployment and application do not have matching security zones.

If such an issue appears, please open the D365 frontend from Microsoft Edge and click the “New” or “Edit” button to open the application. When prompt for a username, use your normal D365 login username to sign in. Once signed in, the “Report Designer” will open as below:

Right-click on a report on the left-hand tree and select “Open” to open the report definition.

Once the report is opened, the most critical section to develop and understand the report development is the “Building blocks” section.

The Row Definition specifies the contents of each row on a financial report, whereas the Column Definition specifies the columns on a financial report. The Reporting Tree definition defines a filtering structure on a financial report that can be used to quickly filter the report data by selecting a tree node on the tree.

Creating Row Definition, Column Definition, and Reporting Tree is a quick technical process that may require some basic understanding of financial structure in the D365 system. So we will not cover these components in this post, but a detailed explanation can be found here.