Financial Dimensions in AX 2009 and AX 2012 provide a means to create additional segments to the main or natural general ledger account in order to track revenues, costs or expenses by a specific attribute, without having to have the segment be imbedded in the natural account itself. Additionally, these dimensions can also be linked to vendors and customers in order to facilitate the dimension tracking for a multitude of transactions. Standard functionality in AX 2009 offers the three predefined dimensions of Department, Cost Center and Purpose. A big upgrade in AX 2012 is the ability for users to create an unlimited number of Financial Dimensions and link them in any combination to vendors, customers and the chart of accounts, creating one or more Financial Dimension sets or structures. These dimension sets can then be used to establish reporting structures, as well as in the validation of data entered for transactions, minimizing errors. Financial Dimensions offers the flexibility to continue to customize your chart of accounts and data analysis based on your business’ growth and needs.

Does the Release of Management Reporter 2.0 Affect You?

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 2010, Microsoft has also released their new reporting tool, Management Reporter, to replace FRx 6.7. While Microsoft is requiring all new Dynamics GP 2010 customers to utilize Management Reporter, existing users running prior versions of Dynamics GP can continue to use FRx 6.7, even with an upgrade to Dynamics GP 2010.  Microsoft will continue to support FRx 6.7 through the end of the Dynamics GP 10.0 lifecycle.

Management Reporter has several new features which gives it an edge over FRx. It allows for windows authentication, version management of the reports and supports reporting on dimensions based data such as departments, locations, and cost centers.  Additionally multicurrency reporting in Management Reporter is now driven from existing rate tables within Dynamics GP 2010, eliminating the need to maintain separate rate tables to facilitate this kind of reporting.

Additional features that users have been asking for in FRx, such as column breaks, undo and redo function and the ability to import images into the header and footer of the reports are now available in Management Reporter.

There are a few limitations of Management Reporter that should be considered in making the decision to upgrade, however there are available workarounds to mitigate these shortcomings.

With all of its new features Management Reporter still utilizes many of the same concepts as FRx enabling users to apply their FRx knowledge as they transition to Management Reporter. It has a similar look and feel for the setup of rows, columns and reporting trees with a slight variation of terminology.  The dropdown boxes in the row and column definitions will provide selection FRx users are familiar with and have a few new selections of added functionality. A migration wizard is available to convert existing row, column, tree and report definitions, report catalogs, account sets and company information to new Report Definitions in Management Reporter, making the transition fairly seamless.