Dive deeper into your data
By Alan R. Earls
The Analytical Accounting module makes financial data analysis with Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Microsoft Great Plains) easy, flexible, and extensible.
Accountants have come a long way from the stereotypical image of sober-minded bean counters wearing green eyeshades. Thanks to packaged software products, accountants at midsize businesses today are more integrated into their company's day-to-day operations. Even better, other employees within the business are learning to look at practices from an accountant's perspective.
Analytical accounting can be used to justify pricing, provide decision-making support, supply control parameters and help evaluate goods and services.
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Discover hidden trends
For the record, the American Accounting Association defines accounting as the process of identifying, measuring, and communicating economic information to permit informed judgments and decisions by users of the information. Accountants and those who use accounting data would probably agree with that broad definition. But to find the hidden trends in your financial data, specialized kinds of accounting should come into play. For example, the information derived from the process of analytical accounting is supposed to meet objectives that are different from those of more traditional accounting functions. Depending on the situation, analytical accounting can be used to justify pricing, provide decision-making support, supply control parameters, and help evaluate goods and services.
Gain deeper insight into your business
That ability to dig deeper is at the heart of the Analytical Accounting module available for Microsoft Dynamics GP. The module provides in-depth, multidimensional financial analysis at the transaction and the business unit levels. That means you can cut through the clutter to see trends, patterns, problems and opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden. The Analytical Accounting module can help enhance decision making by helping you focus on crucial financial data by including or restricting report content. And it allows you to look into accounting transactions, and enables meaningful analysis by organizing data hierarchically for multilevel reporting.
Even better, you can define exactly which information is important to your business. For example, you can devise metrics that match your process, industry and key performance indicators, then examine that financial data based on whatever criteria you determine within a universe of almost limitless user-defined transaction dimension codes and account classes. The bottom line is more accurate reporting and fewer user errors that improve your ability to make realistic forecasts and analyses.
Increase integration with other modules and products
Unlike freestanding products, the Analytical Accounting module is designed to integrate with your other key resources. For instance, you can find and analyze transactions with precision throughout the entire organization across Microsoft Dynamics GP General Ledger, Receivables, Payables, Inventory, Sales Order Processing, Purchase Order Processing and Bank Reconciliation modules. Recently, integration was extended to the Grant Management module, as well.
Furthermore, you can leverage the tight integration between the Analytical Accounting module and Microsoft FRx. Analytical Accounting provides the option of multilevel reporting by grouping transaction dimension codes into various levels, so that when you use it to define valid transaction dimension code combinations you can help lock out invalid entries. With the resulting data, you can analyze financial transactions to fit your specific business requirements. This allows you to classify, report, and analyze financial transactions including Cost Center, Profit Center, Region and Hours, as well as predefined system transaction dimensions such as Customer, Vendor, Item, and Site.
Analyze (with) this
A range of other features and benefits helps you slice and dice your data and get the answers you need. Using Analytical Accounting module, you can do the following:
| • | Attach user-defined transaction dimension codes to ledger transactions, eliminating the need to analyze transactions on the basis of account segments. |
| • | Enable multilevel reporting by grouping any number of transaction dimension codes into a wide range of levels. |
| • | Generate multilevel reports more easily with wizard-driven inquiries that integrate with Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Dynamics GP Smart List. |
| • | Define valid transaction dimension code combinations to prevent invalid combinations being entered, for example, a product group and a region must always appear together and, conversely, a project and cost center can never appear together. |
| • | Display in Office Excel (when multilevel reports are executed) for easy manipulation and integration with non-accounting business data, and for easier presentation. |
| • | Decide how much detail you need to view throughout your entire report or by section with an implode/explode function. |
| • | Analyze transactions across your entire organization through seamless integration with other Microsoft Dynamics GP modules. |
So whether you want to play Sherlock Holmes with your data or you just want to develop specialized reports that reflect your business needs, the Analytical Accounting module can probably help. And with its links to other Microsoft Dynamics GP modules, you may be surprised at how many ways you find to apply its capabilities.
Alan R. Earls is a contributing writer for Momentum, the Microsoft newsletter, magazine and Web site for U.S. businesses. Get free articles and news exclusively for midsize businesses: Sign up for Microsoft Momentum…
