Primary capabilities of financial reporting

This article describes the capabilities that are most widely used for the financial reporting features in Business Central.

Out of the box financial reporting

To help you get started with financial reporting, Business Central provides account categories, subcategories, and mappings to the company’s chart of accounts for basic financial reporting.

Custom financial reporting

If you're already familiar with financial reporting and you want more complex reports, you can create your own.

Comparative views

Beyond monthly balances or net changes, you can apply multiple views to any report you create. For example, you can use formula combinations for standard month to date and year to date views, view trends over the last 12 months, compare current amounts with the prior month or year, and more.

Direct tie to the general ledger

Financial reporting is tied directly to detailed transactional postings from the general ledger.

Use dimensions

Dimensions are data tags you can attach to postings to the general ledger to provide more business insights to financial reporting. Adding dimensions enriches the reports and expands them into operational reporting.

Budget integration

Financial reporting can easily compare budget and actual financial results. You can do the comparisons for any date range and view the results at the general ledger and dimension levels.

Ability to drill down

Numbers in financial reporting that aren't calculated by a formula can take you to the original transactions. You can make active analyses from the financial report to the account level, and from there to the invoices, credit memos, and ledger entries. This quick research tool lets you determine where the number came from, when it happened, what type of document was used, and even which user created the entry.

Export to Excel

The Export to Excel feature lets you format financial reporting so that it looks the same every month, without manual work. Export to Excel makes it easy to produce a professional-looking financial package where values update each period.

No coding needed

Financial reporting doesn't require that you know how to code. Finance professionals can build their own reports and make changes exactly when they need to. It's helpful, however, to understand:

The structure of the chart of accounts.
The dimensions that are used.
The budget amounts.
The basic differences between balance sheet and income statement accounts.
Basic formulas.

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