You asked for better reporting features in Wiise – you got it!
Reporting functionality in Business Central has always been a common pain point for our customers. So over the last couple of months, we've been working on the reporting features in Wiise to address issues with the underlining platform.
The recurring complaint from both customers and partners has always been that reporting in Business Central is frustrating and not user-friendly.
- There’s no central page that lists all available reports in the system
- There’s no way to ‘favourite’ or save reports you regularly run for quick access
- There’s no way to retain, share, or save a set of filters specific to your company’s needs that you can use the next time you run a report
- Each time you want to run a report, you’d need to navigate from the main dashboard or role centre, find the report you'd like to run, manually enter the filters and then run the report. You’re then automatically redirected back to the beginning - the role centre
- If you wanted to make a simple change to one filter, for example running a report for a different month, or even run another report, you’d need to navigate your way from the role centre and find that report again
All this hassle, when all you want to do is run a report quickly, get the information you need, and focus on running your business.
New and improved navigation and content
After collating all the feedback from our customers and partners, we noticed we could categorise most issues into two buckets.
The first bucket was about navigation. This included the difficulty of finding a report you wanted to run. And the ability to run these reports quickly and efficiently.
The second bucket was about content. The report output was either insufficient or gave you irrelevant information.
Developing a proof of concept
As a starting point, we wanted to address issues with navigation. After digging into the system further, we realised there were over 300 reports in Business Central. And they were all scattered around the system in separate modules.
So we gathered all the reports and started looking at a way to consolidate them onto one single page. That then led to the idea of creating a way to favourite reports you regularly run, so you wouldn’t have to find those reports amongst over 300 others.
The mock-up also included a way to run a report while keeping the list of reports in the background. So if you wanted to change the filters or run another report, you could easily select it, as opposed to going back to the role centre.
Once we mocked up the proof of concept to address the first bucket of issues, we shared it with our technical consultants at Wiise to see what we could feasibly develop. With some adjustments, we were ready to share our ideas with customers and partners.
So we scheduled video calls with a small group to demonstrate how Wiise was addressing the reporting issues based on their feedback. We then took what we learned from these sessions and developed what would become phase 1 of the Wiise reporting features.
What’s included in the phase 1 release
Phase 1 includes a new page that displays all reports in Wiise, sorted by the module they sit in. It’ll be released in the March 2020 monthly update of Wiise and will set the framework for future phases of reporting feature enhancements.
Phase 1 includes a way to ‘favourite’ reports and a way to reorder and categorise your favourited reports. You can also run a report and then return to the list. This means you can run another report without having to start back at the role centre.
What’s in store for the future?
Future enhancements in Wiise will continue to address navigation and content issues by building on top of the March development. Here's what they'll include:
- The ability to duplicate and rename a favourite report
- The ability to retain/save reporting filters for quick use
- The ability to view custom reports on a single page. These are reports you've built specifically for your company, like Account Schedules and/ Third Party Reports through extensions
- We’re also developing a Wiise Reporting pack for commonly run reports. This will aim to improve the output and content of the reports to provide insightful and relevant information
The right information at your fingertips
Accurate and efficient reporting is a common success factor for most companies. So the continued development of reporting features in Wiise is vital.
We’ll continue to seek feedback from our customers and partners to make sure future Wiise product developments address your biggest pain points.
If there are any features you'd like to see in Wiise, whether they’re related to reporting or something else, please reach out to me at support@wiise.com – we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Find out what else is included in our latest product release.
