The design philosophy behind Management Reporter is to break information down to the smallest component or building block, and then mix and match components, as needed. Therefore, your report formatting is completely separate from your financial data. As a result, you can change the design of a report without modifying the financial data in your Microsoft Dynamics ERP system.

By using this building block approach, you can combine text, amounts, calculations, and to produce the reports that you need. Equally important, this flexibility encourages creativity by making it easy for you to look at your operations in different ways.

The individual building blocks of a report definition work something like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, but with more power. A report definition specifies the row definition, column definition, and optional reporting tree definition to use for the report. It also includes information about where to store the generated report and how to format it.

For greater reusability and sharing, you can also create a building block group, which is a collection of existing report definitions, row definitions, column definitions, reporting tree definitions, and dimension sets that are associated with a company in Management Reporter. For more information about how to create a building block group, see Building block groups .

Building blocks of a report

Building Block	Description
Row definition	A row definition defines the descriptive lines, for example, salaries or sales, on a report. It also lists the segment values or dimensions that contain the values for each line item and includes row formatting and calculations.
Column definition	A column definition defines the period to use when extracting data from the financial dimensions. It also includes column formatting and calculations.
Reporting tree definition	A reporting tree definition is similar to an organisational chart. It contains individual reporting units that represent each box in the chart. The units can be either individual departments from the financial data or higher-level units that summarise data from other reporting units.
Report definition	A report definition uses a row definition, a column definition, and an optional reporting tree definition to build a report. It also provides additional options and settings to customise a report.

If you are new to designing reports, it is helpful to use the report wizard to quickly create a report definition that you can customise later. If you have experience designing reports and want more flexibility for report design, you can combine new or existing building blocks to create a new report definition.

You do not have to fully understand all available report definition options to produce quality reports. As you become familiar with designing reports, you can expand your report definitions to take advantage of more advanced features.

After you have created a basic report, you can customise the report definition and any of the building blocks in the report definition.

Building blocks of a report

See Also