When evaluating the reporting options available with D365 F&O, it is important to remember that in addition to the more common reporting options like Electronic reporting, the product also includes an analytical type of reporting which is provided out of the box. These reports use an embedded Power BI viewer to render reports which have been added as AOT elements within the system. An example of this is the Cash overview – all companies workspace which can be found as part of the Cash and bank management module.

Reports such as the one seen above can be found embedded within a lot of workspaces within D365 F&O. These are built with the intention of providing key members of an organization with an overview of different areas of their operation without the need of a separate reporting solution. For most organizations, this can also be a good starting point to for identifying their reporting requirements.  

When accessing these reports for the first time, we can see that most them don’t have any data which is pre-loaded.

In order to start loading data into these reports, we must first configure the data to be manipulated and pushed into a separate database which comes with the F&O offering. In addition to the transactional AxDB database that comes with an F&O environment, another database called AxDW is also available. This database is intended to be used for analytical models and the structure of it is created through the Aggregate measure and Aggregate dimensions AOT elements. More information about these will be provided in a future blog post.  

The data to be pushed using these models can be found in a form called Entity store which can be access by following the path System administration -> Setup -> Entity Store. Here the user will find all the aggregate models available within the system (standard and custom) with the ability to configure these to start being used. Here, the user needs to press the ‘Refresh’ button on one of the models in order to let the system know that this model should be refreshed. Upon pressing this button, a message will be shown that the model has been added for refresh. Behind the scenes, a new task will be added to a batch job called Full reset where, based on the recurrence of this job, the model will be processed, and new data will be pushed. These models can also be configured to be refreshed periodically, with the most frequent period being once per hour.

Upon this batch job being executed, data will be pushed into the models in the AxDW database and data will be available in the reports.

Throughout this blog post we have been able to see how to configure to out of the box Power BI embedded reports which and be found within the D365 F&O product. These reports can be used as a good starting point for a reporting solution as they encapsulate the basics of what would be required in a fully fledged reporting solution.