3 steps to better SAP Business One reporting

Post By Charlie Heywood on October 12, 2016

3 steps to better SAP Business One reporting

If you’re a SAP Business One user, you’ll know that it packs a punch when it comes to reporting. Creating an up-to-the-minute report or dashboard is something you can do in seconds and with ease, and combining the software with an external solution like QlikView or Microsoft Power BI provides an even greater degree of power and insight.

The trouble is, there’s a fair chance you’re not making the most of this functionality. It’s not uncommon to see companies with SAP Business One at their disposal that only ever use two or three predefined reports, and therefore miss out on dozens of opportunities to improve their business performance by interpreting and acting on data. This is a criminal waste of potential, particularly after you’ve made the effort to implement an ERP solution.

With this in mind, here are three steps you can take to improve your SAP Business One reporting.

1. Understand the business need first

It’s easy to sit down and think of a dozen reports you could feasibly create from your SAP Business One data, but this is a meaningless exercise unless you first identify what your business actually needs and how reporting will help deliver it.

Say, for example, your commercial director wants to make better-informed pricing decisions for your ecommerce website. This is a need that could easily be served by highly targeted reporting on factors like margins, inventory and online customer purchasing patterns, but you probably wouldn’t think to provide this without a comprehensive requirements capture process upfront.

2. Bring in the right data

Secondly, consider whether there’s value in reporting on data that sits outside of SAP Business One. Even with an all-encompassing business management solution in place, there’s a chance your company still has the potential to improve and enrich its reports with information from other sources. Imagine, for example, what you could accomplish with access to the browsing data captured by your ecommerce platform.

3. Train users to interpret the results

Finally, one of the most common reasons great reporting tools go unused is that users simply aren’t trained to interpret and act on the results in a meaningful way. The purpose and value of a report may be painfully obvious to the person who creates it, but that’s no guarantee it’ll be transparent and logical to the users who are meant to sit down and read it on a daily basis. As such, an appropriate level of documentation, training and learning are essential for SAP Business One reporting to be a success.