UK Dynamics 365 & PowerApps partner

Dynamics 365 Reporting and Goal Management

When you consider a CRM system, reporting often gets overlooked at the expense of other day-to-day features. However, without good reporting, a system soon loses its relevance and data becomes poor quality.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 reporting is underpinned by enterprise grade tools. It includes some of the world’s most powerful reporting features when compared with other providers.

What reporting challenges are you facing?

Do your CRM reports need to better reflect the investment you’ve made in Dynamics 365?

Reporting Graph

Why might you need actionable and more insightful reports?

  • Report definitions not matching business requirements. Such as the data fields returned, the calculations, and the recency of the data within the report
  • Not trusting the data in your CRM and not trusting reports based on that data
  • Reports that should, but don’t help you to understand your customers. Some examples include buying habits, conversions from leads and and quotes won versus quotes lost
  • Ineffective goal management for your teams resulting in a lack of clarity of direction
  • Poorly presented reports – little use of charts or headline numbers. Text overload.

Don’t start heading back to the times before you implemented CRM…

Have you started creating your own reports in Excel to get around these problems?

All of a sudden you find yourself using different systems to report about your business again?

Dynamics 365 has many ways to create useful reports

Views – a simple and flexible way to slice data. Using advanced find you can easily make reports like – all sales opportunities over £100,000, all contacts in UK or all invoices from 2021.

Charts – a built-in method to visualise data. Options include bar charts, pie charts and funnel graphs

Excel – it’s possible to export data to Excel and use its familiar tools to analyse and interpret the data. There are templates to make this process faster

SSRS – This is the most powerful and flexible option, but requires expert knowledge of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Reports are made directly to the database and the options are endless.

Power BI – something of a compromise between the flexibility of charts and the power of SSRS. PowerBI is Microsoft’s standalone reporting suite and can integrate Dynamics data with other sources. The reporting is very visual and in real time and is becoming the default reporting method for Dynamics users

There’s more details about these options here – Reports in Dynamics 365 : An Introduction

How we can help with new reports, views, charts and bespoke reports

We can improve how you report on the data in Dynamics 365 through:

  • Creating new views of your data that match your reporting requirements and are available to all users
  • Adding CRM charts – both standard charts and customised charts – to take advantage of the full and very powerful range of Microsoft charting capabilities
  • Writing bespoke reports using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for both on-premise (SQL) and CRM Online (FetchXML) environments
  • Setting up Power BI real-time reporting and system dashboards
Power BI Reporting Desktop in Dynamics 365

What can you report on in Dynamics 365 sales?

Here are some of the most useful out of the box reports:

  • Account Distribution – Identify patterns in accounts.
  • Account Summary – View a chronological summary of an account.
  • Competitor Win Loss Compare your sales team performance against competitors.
  • Invoice Status – View your accounts receivable.
  • Lead Source Effectiveness Compare your lead sources.
  • Neglected Accounts Identify accounts that have not been contacted recently.
  • Neglected Leads – Identify leads that have not been contacted.
  • Progress against goals View progress against goals
  • Sales History Understand past sales performance.
  • Sales Pipeline View anticipated potential sales.

How we can help with goal management

Goal management is one of the most powerful reporting capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Goals are traditionally used for monthly, quarterly and annual reporting periods. However if your business uses goals on a daily or weekly basis you may be feeling the strain of manually creating those goals in CRM.

We can help you maximise your use of goals in CRM by reviewing the goal metrics and rollup queries that underpin goals. We can also help improve the efficiency of goal management through using techniques such as automated goal creation, which makes the creation of those important daily goals that little bit easier.

The next steps to improved reporting and more effective goal management

If you want to generate more insight about your business and customers, or set, monitor and measure your business goals more effectively, please contact us for further details.

I’d like help with reporting

or call us on 01422 824831 / hello@allmysystems.co.uk

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