A 6-point reporting health check for Business Central

You don't need a project to find out whether your reporting is healthy. Six questions will do it, and you can answer them in ten minutes.

The six checks

1. Can you get your core reports without exporting to Excel?

Good: the pack refreshes from live data. Bad: someone exports and rebuilds monthly. If bad, start here — it's the highest-return fix and we cover it in stop exporting to Excel every month.

2. Does month-end close in hours, not days?

Good: two to three working days for a business of your size. Bad: a week or more, most of it manual. A slow close is usually a reporting problem in disguise.

3. Do the same figures agree wherever you look?

Good: the dashboard, the pack and the ERP agree. Bad: the answer depends on who ran it. This is the most corrosive failure — it undermines trust in every number, including the correct ones.

4. Can non-finance staff self-serve the numbers they need?

Good: operations can answer their own questions. Bad: everything routes through one person in finance, who becomes a bottleneck and a risk.

5. Are dashboards live, not last month?

Good: current data, refreshed automatically. Bad: a slide someone updates manually. Decisions on stale data look fine until they don't.

6. If you own Jet Reports, is it actually configured?

Good: reports built, data sources sound, more than one person can maintain them. Bad: licensed, installed, barely used. This is more common than vendors admit — the tool gets bought, the configuration never gets finished.

Scoring it

• Mostly yes — you're in good shape; focus on keeping definitions documented
• A few no's — there are quick wins, usually in reporting setup rather than software
• Mostly no — reporting is costing you real time, and probably real decisions

What to do with a bad score

Resist the urge to change tools first. Work in this order: agree definitions, fix the highest-frequency manual report, then automate refresh, then extend self-service. Tool changes belong at the end of that list, if at all — and quite often the list resolves the problem before you get there.

Frequently asked