74 - Analysis Views in Dynamics NAV 2017 - Part 1    

Hello and welcome the coffee mug tutorials. Today I want to go through analysis views, they are integral to many of the reporting that we do. By themselves they provide some reporting, I just want to highlight this, I don't think it's going to be as long as the accounts schedule one or the charts one. But it might be a couple of parts to this video.

Right now I’m logged in here as the accounting manager and I want to go into journals and go into the general journal and enter a few entries in here. Just to highlight how we post the dimensions, In one of the videos that we did we actually collapsed one of the revenue accounts into the dimensions and I’m going to use the same account right now, so that’s account number 4450.

As you can see It reduces the dimension from 44100 -200 and 300 the domestic EU and export into just one which was 4450 but what I want to do is post more entries with two dimensions.

Post more entries with two dimensions.
So I only had one, now I’m going to show you how it actually works with two dimensions. 25,000 and we had some ar account we would post it again which was other receivables, so here we have a sale of 25,000 going to other receivables, and I can set the sales channel as a dimension, this is something we had provided in previous videos.

I have created domestic, EU, and export as a possible dimension, so I’ll just do domestic. But I also added here Business group s I have another dimension and this is just to emphasis I can have as many dimensions as I like in general journal, I also have it on purchase journals, sales journals, orders, purchase orders, all kinds of documents and here I’m going to say that this is home related sale.

I’m going to create another transaction, -50,000 that’s going to be the same, it's also going to be domestic, but this is going to be industrial and then finally I am going to create one more for -75,000 and that’s to the business group office, one more, since we are building for this, -100,999 up the_ , and in this case I’m going to pick something else than domestic, I’ll pick export and industrial.

So I’ve been posting here towards same GL account but different dimensions and the idea is in analysis views, that I might be able to break this up and take a look at them individually, so this is all in 25th of January 2018. I just go ahead and post this, yes, successfully posted very good.

New analysis view card
If I go into analysis views, I go into analysis, analysis views and I have a bunch of them already done. I’m just going to create a new one here which is going to be coffee mug 2. I think I have one already in there, so I’m creating a new analysis view card and when I do that I can set up all kinds of filters, I can have it compressed by day or by week, etc.

I can have a starting date and I want to put the starting date as 01 02 2018, I can Include budgets, I can update on posting which I had shown before so I think that's probably a good idea to set in , but one of the more important things of setting this card is picking which dimensions you are going to show, and here you can only pick four, so you gotta pick four dimensions that are going to be displayed in this analysis view and that is also important because you can connect this analysis view to account schedules or to charts, so you can set up different types of analysis views with different types of dimensions combinations in here.

What I’m interested in looking at is the sales channel of course which I had created and the business group which I selecting and so if I set this up like that I’m going to actually include budgets and update this. When I hit update you can see that this actually goes through the entries and creates the analysis view entries which are the combinations of postings, sort of in detail, so you can think about that this card is actually storing transactions that are the dimension entries for all of the transactions posted.

Edit analysis views
I have here Coffee mug 2, so I created this and updated this, now if I go into edit analysis views I get this and I can say here, ok , what do you want to show as lines and what do you want to show as columns and the default is GL accounts and period, but I’m going to go ahead and change this, and actually show the sales channel as lines and the business group as columns.

Now If I take a look at this moment, let's just do view by year so we get everything in and now looking at the entire year 2018. This is probably going to come out with zeros if I don't put some GL filters because all of the GL accounts that we are hitting with dimensions are hitting debit and credit and they are all zero out obviously. So if I filter in a particular account then I’m going to see the actual amounts, so that is very important and which account I’m filtering in, of course, the new account that I had to create the 44050. Now, this should be set up correctly and now I could hit show metrics and yes we do get values.

Here we can see that we have some postings on domestic for home, industrial and office, apparently, there is an inter company there I didn't see, anyways, and I have one posting on export for 100,000. Now you can also notice that the total amounts are different than the amounts added together over here, and why is that?

Well the reason is because I had posted before without specifying the business group here so I have some postings in here that have blank on business group and if we go deeper into dimensions in some of these videos I’ll probably mention how we should be setting dimensions up so that will not happen, but in any case you can see here how we can break up data according to the dimensions we put in this matrix.

Now, in my opinion, this matrix is kind of cool you can see the data, you can play around with it, you can actually take a look at the actual amounts, the budget amounts and then variants to that. In this matrix obviously, you can flip the sign around and show it like that etc.

But the real power in my mind is not necessarily in this analysis view and matrix but rather the entries that come out of this, which can be used in account schedules to set up even nicer in the column layouts like we did before in one of the videos. But it's important to understand what analysis views is all about so even though it's showing us a matrix and here you can see the data here, it is technically also maintaining all of the data entries that you need to show them in any other reporting.

And you can see that by going into the actual analysis card and seeing that it's actually updating every time you post.