Professional Sports Team Financial Reporting with Dynamics GP

In this article, we’ll explore today’s best financial reporting solutions for professional sports teams that depend on Microsoft Dynamics GP for data management and analytics.    

In today’s business world, a dynamic financial reporting tool is necessary for transforming your company data into analytics that better prepare you to make sound decisions for your organization’s future – and it’s no different for professional sporting teams.  As a professional sports organization, you might be overwhelmed staying competitive as a team, a corporation and a brand – AND figuring out your best option for financial reporting to help you to do just that.  In this article, I’ll go about discussing the feature and functionality offerings in modern financial reporting tools you can use as a professional sports team with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

As a definition, financial reporting produces custom financial statements compiling your operational and transactional data, either directly from Dynamics GP or from a Business Intelligence (BI) data store, like an online analytical processing (OLAP) cube or data warehouse.   Dynamics GP has a built-in legacy reporting function, called Report Writer, but a lot of users are relying on the retired FRx or its successor from Microsoft, Management Reporter (MR).  There are other modules that GP comes equipped with:  Analysis Cubes, Power BI, Smartlist, SSRS, and more, which makes for a lot of technology to learn.  Furthermore, none of these are a unified, universal financial report writer that can report across all of the GP modules, are easy-to-use when designing reports, and additionally offer web and mobile end user solutions with today’s formatting.  But independent software vendors (ISVs) have excelled at bringing more dynamic, more business user friendly report writers to the marketplace that empower finance teams to create customizable, reusable templates, with analytical capabilities that will particularly serve and meet your professional sporting BI needs.  When seeking the best reporting tool, you should evaluate how you want to integrate your data, whether you want to go with an Excel, web, and/or proprietary platform, as well as other characteristics, like ease of use, security, and collaboration, amongst other things.

A lot of Dynamics GP consumers, including professional sporting organizations, have voiced the question of why they should not just implement one or more of the solutions that comprise the Microsoft BI stack, which has been around for some time, but if you quickly do some Internet research, you will find article after article discussing limitations, disappointments, and the desire for more from non-Excel, GL-specific, non-web report writing that FRx, MR, and Report Writer offer users.  You might think these options are hard to ignore because they tend to be free for the most part, but you are getting what you pay for with these proprietary platforms.  If you are looking to actually upgrade your reports and are willing to make an investment in a tool, there are plenty of business user friendly solutions that offer modernly formatted sub ledger reporting, live integrations, and flexibility in the form of web and mobile access.

To continue learning more financial reporting options for professional sports teams with Microsoft Dynamics GP, read the rest of this article here.

by Solver, Inc.