Management Reporter

Stockholders equity statement

19 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by Ludwig Reinhard in General Ledger, Management Reporter

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Annual report, Reporting, Statement of Equity

This webcast demonstrates how one can create a stockholders equity statement in the standard MSDyn365FO application with the help of reason codes and the Management Reporter. A major focus is made on demonstrating how to setup the Management reporter stockholders equity report that necessitates the calculation of multiple beginning and ending balances for the different periods covered. The principle demonstrated in this webcast can be applied to other reporting scenarios such as cash flow reports or reports that detail accruals and changes in accrual balances.

Link multiple Management Reporter reports

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Ludwig Reinhard in Management Reporter

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Link reports, Management Reporter

Linking different Management Reporter (MR) reports is a common finance scenario when for example the profit/loss from the Income Statement (IS) is linked to the equity section of the Balance Sheet (BS).

Microsoft provided a detailed description, which exemplifies how this linkage between the IS and BS reports can be established. For details, please see the following website.

Some time ago I was confronted with the requirement of linking multiple MR reports to a newly created one. As Microsoft already provided a detailed description of the necessary setup steps, I initially thought that linking multiple MR reports just follows the same principle, which is required for linking a single report.

For that reason (and based on the Microsoft guideline), I simply added two instead of a single row link in my MR row definition to get the data from the BS and IS report loaded into my newly created report. The next screen-print exemplifies this setup, where the first row link (‘BS’) links to the Balance Sheet report and the second one (‘IS’) links to the Income Statement report.

The row definition of my newly created report consequently includes two rather than a single column that reference the cells in the already existing MR reports through the ‘@WKS(…)’ fields.

The column definition used was identical to the one used in the Microsoft guideline and included only a single FD (financial dimension) column. The next screen-print illustrates the setup of this so-called column definition.

After having done all the setups that I considered important, I was very much disappointed once I noticed that the report did not include the IS data.

Some additional investigation of the report creation process lead me to the report queue status form where I noticed the following message:

Based on this warning message, the report setup with the two row links obviously seemed to be the wrong approach to incorporate data from multiple other MR reports into my newly created one. To get this corrected, I first changed the link type for the Income Statement data to ‘Management Reporter Worksheet’.

In line with this change, the cell reference was changed from ‘@WKS(B=C35)’ to ‘C35’ and a column restriction was incorporated into the row definition setup, which is exemplified in the next screen-print.

In addition, a reporting tree was setup, which linked to the different financial dimensions/worksheets specified in the row definition setup form. Example:

It is important that all financial dimensions/worksheet references, which are specified in the row definition form are included in the reporting tree. Otherwise, the report generation will interrupt with an error message.

The last setup required relates to linking the different reporting tree elements to the report columns. How this linkage can be established is illustrated in the next screen-print.

With those report modifications in place, the report could finally be created and showed all the data retrieved from the other MR reports. The report could of course be further refined by including the values shown in the FD and WKS column into a single one. For reasons of brevity this exercise is, however, skipped here and left as an exercise for the reader.

In order to allow you a direct comparison with the Microsoft guideline referenced in the beginning, all setups and reports exemplified in this post have been created with the MR version CU12. In more recent MR versions, the link type ‘Financial dimension + Worksheet’ has been removed. As a result, linkages to multiple MR reports can only be realized through the ‘Management Reporter Worksheet’ link that has been used for incorporating the IS data above.

Management Reporter – Unit Security

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Ludwig Reinhard in Management Reporter

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Data access, Reporting Tree, Restriction, Unit Security

Within this post I would like to present a feature that allows you restricting the access to data included in Management Reporter financial reports. A common business scenario where this feature can be applied are situations where business unit/cost center managers shall only have access to the data of the business unit/cost center they are responsible for.
Let’s have a look at the following Income Statement report that shows the total amounts split up by business units to see how the Management Reporter unit security feature can be applied.

Assume that we want to restrict the report data access for Phyllis, the manager of business unit BU001, in a way that she has Access to the Income Statement data of her business unit only. This restriction can be accomplished by setting up a report with a reporting tree that includes the respective users in the unit security column. Because the report includes all business units next to each other in separate columns, the reporting tree elements need additionally to be linked to the respective columns. This is linkage and the unit security setup is illustrated in the next screen-print.

With this setup in place, Phyllis will see the following report, once she opens it.

Notes:
The security restriction setup does also apply to the Management Reporter drill down functionality in Dynamics AX. That is, if Phyllis wants to see the voucher transaction details that make up a specific amount shown in the report and drills down into the Dynamics AX voucher transactions, she will only see the filtered transactions for her business unit. This system behavior is illustrated in the next screen-print:

A second thing to note here is that the Management Reporter unit restriction does not control whether or not Phyllis can open and access all transaction details through the Dynamics AX client directly. In the example used Phyllis can, for example, log into the Dynamics AX client and access the complete voucher details including the amounts that were recorded for the other business units. Example:

If you have users that can circumvent the Management Reporter unit restriction this way, you have ensure that you also implement the extensible data security framework in Dynamics AX. Otherwise, the unit security feature does not make much sense. Please see the following sites 1 / 2 for additional information on the extensible data security framework.

Report modification 1
Now let’s have a look at some Management Reporter design considerations that you should be aware of when making use of the unit security feature and reporting trees in general. Let’s imagine that the Income Statement report shown previously is modified in a way that also the cost centers that make up a business unit are included in separate report columns. If you follow the same unit restriction setup shown previously also for the sub-elements of the business units …

… users won’t see all details once they open their report. In the example used Phyllis, will see the following data when opening the report:

The data for the cost centers that make up the business unit cannot immediately be identified but rather have to be opened separately by selecting one of the business units. Example:

Report modification 2
Because of the previous data illustration issue, the report is modified once again in a way that the business unit and total columns are now setup as computed columns. (Please see the yellow highlighted section in the next screen-print).

With this setup in place, Phyllis will get the following message once she opens the report.

By selecting one of the cost center elements, she will finally be able to see the data for the selected cost center but not automatically for the other ones without selecting them separately.

Report modification 3
To avoid that the Income Statement report opens with an error message for the business unit / cost center managers, the report design is further modified as follows:

The major difference to the previous setup is that cost center sub-elements that make up the business division are now intended in the reporting tree. This setup finally ensures that Phyllis is able to see all data of the business unit she is responsible for when opening the report.

If Phyllis drills down to the different sub-elements, the report will filter the selected data respectively. Example:

Summary
I hope the different examples gave you an impression what to look out for when designing Management Reporter reports that include reporting trees and make use of the unit security feature. The major take away from this post is that setting up the unit security feature in Management Reporter does not make much sense if users can circumvent those restrictions by extracting the data directly from the AX client. To avoid such scenarios you have to ensure that the extensible data security framework is applied concurrently in the AX client.