Every accountant can verify that reports are a necessary evil. Microsoft Dynamic GP first supplemented its internal reports with FRx. Which was transitioned out to Management Reporter to the relief of the GP world? Even experts, such as Mark Polino have written since 2016 about how it is time to rethink Management Reporter, as seen in his article here.

Issues with the datamart have failed consultants consistently. I cannot count the number of times I have received a call that their datamart database is over 100GB. We patch it and provide guidance on report retention. Legacy mode, which works the best for most of my clients, has been discouraged. Microsoft has also removed its road-map for the product, essentially putting it in a graveyard for development. What you see is what you will get. There are no new features coming our way. Updates are only to fix the known bugs and issues with the product.

If Management Reporter is now a functionally dead product, we must ask ourselves what product will replace it? My theory is Jet Global. Here are my top 4 reasons. (https://www.jetglobal.com/)

4. Gain some of your time back. Many companies spend hours upon hours every week manually recreating the reports from information pulled from Microsoft Dynamics GP. With Jet Global you set up the report once to pull and calculate from certain fields. The next time your, team opens the report and selects a refresh button. Voila. You got your report and all of your calculations.

3. It is Microsoft Excel based. Every customer I have worked with lives within Microsoft Excel. Whenever I set up an SSRS, Smartlist, or even Management Reporter reports the first question I get is “How do I get this into Excel?” Why go through all that hassle and not just skip directly to Microsoft Excel. Jet Global acts as an Excel Add-on that allows you to securely pull your data into Microsoft Excel. Power Pivot does the same, without the encryption.

2. Which brings me to my third reason…security. As a data professional, I would be remiss to provide any option without consideration to the security of the data. I have had other clients utilize Microsoft Excel data connections. These are not secure and can often have the password for the ODBC within the connection when it refreshes. With Jet Global, everything is encrypted. Even after you are connected, you can have row-level security on the report. Microsoft Excel that uses the data connection doesn’t offer the same level of control over the security.

1. And finally, Jet Global offers additional data connections that will allow your team to connect to multiple data sources at once. Meaning you can have SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics GP data within the same refreshable Excel report. Additionally, the formulas that you place in from the Excel worksheet will auto-refresh from all connected data sources.