Acumatica Reporting Tools

Turning Raw Data Into Actionable Insight

Acumatica ERP delivers loads of reports, and reporting options. After all, what good is capturing and storing all that valuable data if you don’t have an easy way to slice, dice, analyze and turn it into actionable insight? In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the powerful Acumatica Reporting Tools that are available to you.

Click to jump to a specific section:

• Acumatica Reporting Overview
• Generic Inquiries
• Advanced Filters
• Pivot Tables
• Dashboards
• Power BI Pages
• Analytical Reports
• Report Designer

Acumatica Reporting Overview

Acumatica ERP provides built-in reporting tools to deliver customized business intelligence to everybody in your organization. To get you up and running quickly, there is a collection of pre-built reports that you can modify, or you can get personal and develop your own NEW reports – either of which can be delivered online, converted to PDF, or sent by email. And of course, with full security and rights management, these reporting tools can be made available in full or limited in access to system users.

The Acumatica reporting toolkit includes generic inquiries, pivot tables, advanced filters, dashboards, Power BI pages, analytical reports, and the Acumatica Report Designer.

Let’s take a look at each of these reporting tools in more detail.

Generic Inquiries

A generic inquiry is an Acumatica ERP reporting tool that has an easy-to-use web-based interface and gives you the ability to pull data from the database and display it on a customizable form. You can view, on-the-fly, how each inquiry looks, and then test its functionality by selecting parameters and viewing the results.

Additionally, you can use generic inquiries to expose data from Acumatica ERP to OData clients, such as Microsoft Power BI and Excel.  Generic inquiries can serve as a base for dashboard widgets and pivot tables, and as an entry point for data entry forms. You can create and manage generic inquiry forms by using the Generic Inquiry form.

Advanced Filters

In Acumatica, you can create advanced filters for mass processing, inquiry, and generic inquiry forms to filter the data in these forms. Once you create an advanced filter, the system adds a tab with the filtered data on that form. You can create as many filters as you need for a particular form for either personal use or (with appropriate access) share them with other users.

Once the advanced filter is saved, the new system-generated tab will display again automatically when you open that form in the future which saves you time having to manually re-filter the data each and every time you launch the form. Refer to this guide on Managing Advanced Filters for more detail.

Pivot Tables

With Acumatica, you can build pivot tables based on the data from generic inquiries. A pivot table is a tool that you can use to automatically summarize, sort, reorganize, group, count total, or average data in a generic inquiry to view it from different perspectives. You can configure and change the pivot table structure by dragging fields to the panes.

You can create pivot tables and share them with other users as forms. You can place any pivot table in a workspace by adding it to the site map and then specifying the needed levels of access rights to the pivot table for the user roles available in the system.

Refer to this Pivot Tables Guide to learn how to create and configure tables.

Acumatica Dashboards

Acumatica Dashboards are a powerful and convenient tool for monitoring and analyzing critical business information. Built on the concept of visual reporting, dashboards are comprised of a collection of widgets that can display charts, data tables, Power BI tiles, key performance indicators (KPIs), trend card KPIs, and more. Just like the dashboard in your car, you get quick and easy access to all the critical info you need at a glance.

What’s more, you can customize dashboards to focus only on the information and widgets that are important to you and your role in the company.

Refer to the Dashboards Form for information on creating and managing dashboards.

See Also: 3 New Financial Management Dashboards for AR, AP and Controller.

Power BI Pages

As mentioned earlier regarding Dashboards, one of the best ways to turn your raw data into actionable insight is through visual graphs, charts, and key performance indicators. That’s where Power BI Pages for Acumatica really shines.

Because Acumatica ERP is designed to make it easy to pull data from external applications into your system, you can pull Microsoft Power BI reports into Acumatica and have these reports displayed as forms.

A popular tool with business decision-makers, Power BI from Microsoft is a modern business intelligence platform designed to connect to all your data sources and provide a complete view of your company using visual dashboards that update in real time.

See Also: How to Use the Free Power BI Templates in Acumatica

Acumatica Analytical Reports (ARM)

Analytical reports in Acumatica ERP can be created with the Analytical Report Manager (ARM) toolkit. Reports that are constructed with this toolkit are called ARM reports to distinguish them from the reports created in the Acumatica Report Designer.

The Analytical Report Manager toolkit gives you the ability to create financial reports that retrieve the amounts posted to specific General Ledger accounts and sub-accounts.  The ARM toolkit can also be used to create project accounting reports.

Analytical reports are used to provide the summarized and aggregated values in a variety of views that can be displayed monthly, yearly, and quarterly, and the data can provide information from the point of view of departments, selected account classes, and other dimensions.

Web-based and simple to use, programming skills or knowledge of the underlying database structure is not required to get up and running quickly and using ARM to modify existing financial reports or develop new ones. Simply leverage the advanced data selection criteria, data calculation rules, and customizable report layout design features to start designing and running custom analytical reports.

Acumatica Custom Report Designer

Acumatica Report Designer provides visual tools that you can use to design custom reports. With the Acumatica Report Designer, you can select data for a report, calculate required values based on the selected data, and customize a report layout.

The Acumatica Report Designer is a standalone Windows-based application with the ability to extend the list of standard reports provided with Acumatica ERP. When the standard reports don’t contain your desired data, or when the look and layout doesn’t meet your needs, you can leverage this tool to design your own custom report.

A main advantage of the Acumatica Custom Report Designer over some of the other reporting tools mentioned is flexibility and customization. This powerful platform delivers the following main advantages in representation of data in your custom reports:

• Use of formatting options, for example, a font style, size, color, and background color, and use of predefined and custom style templates

• Customization of report layout according to your needs

• Use of pictures, barcodes, and charts

Refer to this Report Designer Guide or go here for the Acumatica Report Designer Download.

Reporting Tools Demo