Role Center Charts in Dynamics NAV 2017 - Part 5            

Today what we are going to do is go over charts again, we are actually moving forward in our chart lecture, and what I wanted to go deeper in today is the performance charts, there are a few charts that end with performances, they are called:

•  Inventory performance
•  Sales performance
•  Purchase performance

These charts are a little bit different than the other charts, they actually allow you to set up sort of like analysis view to work within this chart, so we can change it around these are actually kind of cool. Have a lot of features.

What I wanted to do is create a simple chart for the inventory performance, and sort of highlight how the sales and purchase chart is different than the inventory performance chart.

Inventory Performance Chart
So, If I go in here and hit “Select chart”. I get the default chart that is showing behind me has something to do with desks, we share our business with furniture store and also some service depo but what we do are coffee mugs as everybody knows, and I would like to see the sales of coffee mugs and coffee beans on a timeline, so I’m gonna create that.

So I click on “Select chart” and I get an “Analysis report chart list” up, and I’m gonna create a new one. I’m gonna call this “CM” for Coffee Mug, and it asks me then to do analysis report name and it has a list, and if I click into the list I get a bunch of names here that somebody else created, I’m gonna create a new analysis report to attach to this chart so I'll just click new again here and it gives me option to fill one in, I'm gonna call that one CM as well and this is gonna be like a few windows. I hope you don't get confused. But the Ideas is that we have an analysis report which has lines and columns that we set up and we attach this to this chart and then run the chart.

Right now what I’m doing is creating an invoice report called coffee mug and then I get into this column here which is asking me to set up the lines, so which lines I want to have in my chart.

So if I click on that, I have also something that somebody else created and I'm gonna create a new one. We are gonna call it “CM” as well call it coffee mug lines, and here I can click on lines up here and what that does, It allows me to bring in lines for the chart that I’m creating and I can bring in items or item groups right here, and it actually can be filtered on dimensions if you guys are using dimensions.

So I’m gonna just call the first row here “MUGS” and those are coffee mugs because we also sell beans. So we have one for mugs, I’ll keep it as ITEM, I could have actually selected Item group or even a formula; I’m not gonna get into how that is, but you can have formula lists; I'll get into the range and ill get a list of items, now I'm gonna find my Coffee mugs which there in some seventy thousand sixty-three so I have to ones, I got the Standard and the fall coffee mug. I can just select both of them like that, hit ok, and it brings in the range.

I also want to have beans, Coffee beans, And ill put in here the range that is seventy thousand sixty-one - sixty-two. And that brings in that range, and now I actually just hit ok. Now I’ve got the lines now I'm gonna hit ok. And I got the line template in.

Now I have to create a column template this is what we wanna see as columns, so I'll go in there and hit new again and create my one. Call the coffee mug CM, so I’m just gonna have this , call the coffee mug analysis or sales quantities, and here in the analysis column I click on columns, and I'm actually just gonna put in one column called Quantity QTY and I want to show the Invoiced item entries and I can actually look up here what they are. And these options come with NAV, you can actually set up more if you get deeper into this but I’m gonna pick up sales quantity, I’m gonna show it opposite, because all sales quantities are negative on the item entries so you get negative numbers if I don't click this: “show opposite”, and it automatically puts a value type of quantity. So I’m just gonna show the sales quantities for these two, for now.

Notice that you can do a lot more, you can compare to other periods, you can put in a formula between the columns, you can pick up cost, you can obviously put in profitability. A lot of options here, this is very flexible but for the simplicity of this video, I'm just put the sales quantity. I'll hit ok, and ok on that.

So now I've created the analysis template name on this analysis line and analysis column template name for my coffee mug analysis report.

I have lines which are going to be the beans and the mugs and I have the column which is gonna be the sales quantity, so I hit ok on that. And I’m back to the analysis report chart set up, and when I hit enter on this it actually brings in the coffee mug quantity and coffee beans as columns, so it recognizes the column immediately, and if I hit ok on this, I know I have a new one and I select that for my report, notice I get now the coffee mugs, and coffee beans quantity in the 25th week and I can see here that I have 300 sold of coffee beans and 400 sold of coffee mugs, and I can see actually the day that it was sold. I can move between periods like this, I can change the period length to be a month so I can see this is in January etc.

Now, this is a very simple example of how to use the inventory performance as you could see you can set up many more columns you can actually stack them, there are many options you can put in here.

Just to finish this up, how is the inventory performance chat different from the sales performance and purchase performance, it's really not that different, and there might be more, but the most significant difference, if I go into this one here for example.

Sales performance chart
Is the Lines, which lines you can select to bring in. On the inventory I could only select items or item groups, however, If I go into the sales performance I could go into “edit” and I’d go into this “Analysis report” click on “advanced” and I look at the line. Here I have customer groups, look this is already pretty obvious, I can bring in Customers and customer groups, I can also, In the sales analysis bring in item and item groups and the salesperson. So, the lines have more options than in the inventory performance, this is technically a stronger chart.

Purchase performance Chart
For the vendor side in Purchase performance, you can see vendors. The same exact thing, go in here, go to edit, look at this one, I think I created a quick test one. Go into the line and advanced and lines, you know I have to drill a lot to get into this. Now you can see that the types, that we can bring in our vendors, salespeople, of course, item groups and formulas.

So you cannot bring the vendor on the sales performance, you cannot bring the customer on the purchase performance and you can only bring items on the inventory performance.

That is the separator between these charts, other than that they work pretty similar all around.
I know this was a little bit convoluted in screens, but if you start from the chart and do it like I do, like new, new, drill and out. It makes more sense. You can also find these forms in the setups in NAV.

I Hope to have shed some light on these performance charts.