Kjell Otterlei

I have several clients that wants to use Excel when analyzing data. PowerBI is great for visuals and presentation of data, but for large parts of accounting staff, Excel is still the way to go. 

 

Yesterday, I built a report in a dev environment. I connected to the AxDw in Excel in the dev box, and further connected to the LedgerActivityMeasures and the LedgerActivityMeasure_Dimensioncombination. I created the link between the tables in the data management part of Excel, and just like that the client have an excellent data model with general ledger data.They can pivot and arrange reports how they want. Like you could with cubes in AX2012. 

 

But.... 

 

You cannot connect to the Aggregate Measurements outside of a dev box, and thus the excellent report I made from out of the box D365 functionality becomes useless.

 

I really see the need to access the AxDw and the aggregate measurements outside of a dev environment to use with Excel. This opens up a whole lot of reporting options for clients, and the best thing is: it is standard data models!! All you have to do is to create the relationships between the tables. 

 

Please consider this to be a possibility. If we can connect to any front-end tool to use the Aggregate Measurements, it will open up so many possibilities to utilize the standard data models, instead of deploying entities to a Azre SQL DB and then build your data model from that.

In Approve and Calculate, you have the option to choose to view "view 1 person, one week". This gives you a weekly overview of the hours from the employees in your approval/calculation group per week. This is the most efficient way to approve/calculate hours for employees. After the 31st of December, the date filter in D365FO changes to start on week one in the new year by design. This means you cannot use this view to approve/calculate hours for last weeks in the previous calendar year. This leads to having to use the view "view entire group, 1 day" and filter on single days in the last weeks of the year, one by one day. For companies with many employees, this is a very poor way to work, causing approvers of hours to work ineffectively. You should be able to filter on "year", so you can use the "view 1 person, one week" filter to approve/calculate hours for employees effeciently for the last weeks in the calendar year.

Consider a worker that has a working time from 08.00 - 16.00, and flex periods before and after standard working time. In D365FO today, a worker works full day and clocks out. Then the worker goes home, but returns to work at a later time. He is now in his flex period, but is prompted to enter an absence cause when clocking back in. The system should not ask for an absence cause because the worker is working extra hours. In my example below, only flex+ should be calculated. Our proposal is to create a parameter that can be set on the time profile. The parameter can be named something like "don't require absence reason", and should be able to set on flex lines in the time profile, so that the workers are not required to give an absence reason if they working in their flex period after working a full day.