https://www.xperience-group.com/news-item/six-custom-reports-for-crm/
One of the biggest benefits of using a CRM is the ability to customise your reports. Each individual employee can build reports in a way that allows them to see the information they need to do their jobs, more clearly. Custom reports on CRM also allow you to save time through automation. Rather than trying to bring together disparate sources of data CRM already has it in one place.
But with so many options available to you, what are the best reports you can customise?
An Advanced Find (AF) is an enhanced search that allows you to be more specific in what you’re looking for. When you know what you want the answers to you can build the AF using filters and add or take away columns depending on what you need to see. You can then export the results of your query to Excel. You can also save your AF for future use meaning you can run the query any time you need to without having to build it all over again.
Views are one of the easiest means of setting up a report. Any employee who has user access to Dynamics CRM can create a View. In a view, you can define the columns you need to see and even how wide they’ll be. You can determine how the records will be sorted and what filters will be used so that only what you want to see will be shown. You can also combine your View with an Advanced Find to create a more complex query.
Creating charts and graphics as a visual representation of your data makes it much easier for your audience to understand what you’re telling them. At a glance, they can take in the points of the data, and you can use different kinds of charts to really focus on the data you wish to highlight. For example, you create a chart to show the company’s expenditure. Touching on part of that chart will then show you further detail of the time of expenditure and percentage contributions.
Power BI is a Cloud-based reporting package by Microsoft. It provides tools for aggregating, analysing, visualising and sharing data. The main benefit of Power BI is that it can connect disparate data sets, clean the data, and create visuals to present the data all on one platform. You can pull your sales data from Dynamics and finance data from your ERP and pop all the data into a dashboard for easy access.
Data Warehousing is a report that allows you to access large amounts of data across different systems. It provides a centralised repository for data, making it easier to manage and access the data you need. With a Data Warehouse report, you can run queries on data from different sources, and generate custom reports.
The more data you hold in your CRM the more complicated your reporting needs will be. You may need to utilise one if not all the custom reports on CRM outlined above for different reporting needs.
If you need to talk about the reporting capabilities of your CRM or simply wish to talk about upgrading to Dynamics 365 CRM then feel free to get in touch with our experts.