Dynamics 365 Business Central: Be more insightful with BC

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Be more insightful with BC

Hey, so we've been going through Power Bi and the stack and all of that we're going to take a little break from, that I'm no longer in front of the whiteboard. I wanted to go into insights, Microsoft is trying to think for us and put stuff up that we know we didn't think about looking at, but when we see it it's going to help our business. I think next year is going to be a lot about that, it's going to be about trying to figure out how you can manage your business or Microsoft in essence, is trying to figure out things that will help you manage your business before you think about it. Like KPIs, there's been a lot of talk about KPIs, I mean do you really use KPI's? do you go in there and think about ok, this number I have calculated out, I want this love but to be lower than it was last month, it means something to me.

What is it really? I mean, do I divide invoices, the sales by invoices, get an average sales amount per invoice, does that mean anything to me? you know. things like that and we need to be more intelligent about how we manage our business. A little step in that direction is insights in Business Central, so if you if you log into the system, immediately it starts displaying these things in the upper left corner you probably go right by that and go straight into sales invoices or purchase orders or stuff like that. If you stop for a little bit and take a look at these insights and what they are really telling you, it might actually be helping your business, it might be helpful to start saying, hey, that number I want to get that number up or this number is actually in a dangerous area so, we need to take action. If it's above this it's fine, if it's below that it's not good, so we need to do something.

Let's take a look at the insights inside Business Central and slowly go through that, I know it's not a lot and then keep our eyes open for you know what comes next or maybe that Microsoft well more to that or the fact that we can do that through some of the Power Bi stuff that we've been doing, etc.

If we're looking at the system, I'm just logged here straight into Business Central and I'm not going to be going through any business process I'm just going to  be looking at this particular area here, the inside screen, if I go here and click on this dot I get the headline, personally I think this is maybe not necessary to have, I know it's kind of nice to get good afternoon, but we are in an ERP system so we don't need to be cute but okay great. The next one here is the best-selling item was the guest section 1 with 49 units sold and this is insight from the last three months, so it's looking at the last three months telling us that this item was our bestseller. I can click on that and see all the best seller for the last three months and the quantities, this is sorted by quantity, so I think this is nice.

Just getting that up on the screen, these are our bestsellers, this is the bestseller last three months would be nice to be able to say, well I'm more interested in seeing last week, maybe our business is very fast flowing and last week is more interesting to me than last month. Anyways, we get this, if I go on to the next one here, is another insight from last month,

So, we had three months this one is the next one your top customer school of fine art who bought for 28,000 this is last month not last three months and I think it's fixed what it's looking at, if I click on this I get list of all the customers and I get them listed by amount for the last month. Finally, here we have the lasted posted sales invoice and we can click on that, we get a list of all invoices, this one is pretty good I guess, if you want to monitor high invoices, If that's something that's interesting to you. Then finally you closed more for more deals than the same period last year, I liked this one a lot, so if you're actually in the business of closing deals, new deals, you can see here if your salespeople are doing better than last year, but if you click on this, it actually just looks at the sales invoices and counts them up for the period and compares to last year. The interesting part here is that we have a field called closed and this doesn't mean that we closed it, like yes or no, it actually means that if it has been fully paid it's closed. so it's not looking at whether it's closed or not here, some people might misunderstand that.

All right, so if we actually think about this part for a second, I think is a great area for these insights, it's a great idea, but you probably want to tailor it a little bit, and I think this is the beginning of that thought for Microsoft. In the system, when you log in, will start identifying what could be interesting to you to see and maybe it's different for different companies based on the data that's in the system, so I think this is the birth of that and we're going to see more coming there. We, of course, have these intelligent cloud insights and I have also looked at that before and here they bring in KPIs how much cash is available, what's the profitability, the net income, etc. I believe this is just for the year, for the net income and profitability, of course, cash available in on the balance sheet basis and here you also have insights, twelve of your customers are late, thirteen invoices were not paid by you on time so you didn't pay them on time and then we have how many are supposed to be paid by your customers, what we should be paying this week.

Then we have, of course, Power Bi, Microsoft's saying, here I'm trying to identify stuff for you, here we are showing some Power Bi reports but you can, of course, select the report in here, we can build reports to put in her. If we want to do things by ourselves or for ourselves, we can do that with Power Bi in insert here; that might actually be a good idea to put into a video to show how we can actually select a report in here, and then finally we have a cash flow forecast. So insights are a theme here, this is something that wasn't in previous versions of NAV and is in Business Central so I think we should take this seriously and start understanding how insights on the front page when we log in, can help us manage our business and what are the insights that we want to see like this when we log in.