In previous posts we have told news about expense management in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations since the employee's point of view Y from the manager's point of view.
Today we will see some novelties from the point of view of the needs that the organization's management has for control at a higher level, be it budgetary, process optimization, or merely informative. At this point the concept of Business Intelligence (BI) appears and to fit in with Dynamics as a precision mechanism, Microsoft generates the information content with Power BI.
Power BI reports give managers and supervisors the perfect tool to control their budgeted expenses. In addition to being able to visualize trends and have a general idea of budget evolution, these reports are responsible for showing exceptions and outliers, essential for understanding the situation and planning corrective actions if necessary.
Thus, the specific cases that need attention are not drowned out by the generality and managers can dedicate their efforts to improving those specific cases without having to dedicate resources to finding them or, what would be worse, giving them up as lost because the effort to locate them would nullify the benefits of correcting them.
The reports also allow you to understand the seasonality of expenses by category or department, allowing better prediction of mismatches between budgeted and actual expenses over time. This knowledge of the seasonality of spending makes it possible to predict and control non-linear spending trends before they pose a problem.
As a form of savings, knowledge of seasonality and spending trends in each area of the organization make it possible to negotiate better contracts with suppliers of recurring materials and services. Another benefit of this knowledge is the improvement in the ability to coordinate the entire spending process, eliminating unnecessary delays.
The insights gained through the reports will help managers understand spending patterns and improve future budgeting.
From a technical standpoint, reporting and instrumentation is integrated within Power BI so managers can proactively manage their expense lines. They will also be able to generate their own reports and KPIs (key performance indicators) without the need for help from the IT department, thus having at all times the information that makes their work easier.
