Business Central includes useful built-in reporting capabilities, but many businesses find they need more flexibility and depth for financial analysis, management accounts, and operational reporting. Creative Computing offers three complementary reporting solutions: Cosmos for financial consolidation and management reporting, Jet Apps for self-service Excel-based reporting directly connected to your Business Central data, and Power BI for rich visual dashboards and real-time business intelligence. Each serves different use cases, and many businesses use a combination of two or more depending on their reporting needs.

With the right reporting tools in place, absolutely. Jet Reports and Jet Analytics in particular are designed to empower finance teams to build, modify, and refresh their own reports in Excel, using a familiar interface without needing to write code or raise IT requests. Users can drag and drop fields, connect directly to live Business Central data, and produce fully formatted management accounts, P&Ls, and variance reports on demand. This self-service capability is one of the most valued aspects of the Jet Apps suite for finance professionals.

Power BI connects directly to Business Central's data and allows you to build interactive visual dashboards that update in real time as your data changes. Management teams can access KPI summaries, cash flow trends, sales performance, and operational metrics from any device (including mobile) without needing to log into Business Central itself. Dashboards can be published and shared across the organisation, and users can drill into the underlying data to explore the numbers behind any figure. It's particularly powerful for senior leadership who need high-level visibility without needing to navigate the full ERP system.

Cosmos is specifically built for this requirement. It enables finance teams to consolidate data across multiple Business Central companies and produce group-level management accounts, eliminating the manual work of pulling data from different entities and reconciling it in a spreadsheet. Cosmos supports intercompany eliminations, currency conversion, and the production of formatted board-level reports, making it the tool of choice for group finance functions that need accurate consolidated reporting without significant manual effort each period.

Most clients see a dramatic reduction in reporting time quite quickly after implementation. The key shift is moving from manually extracting data and building reports from scratch each period, to having live, pre-built report templates that refresh with current data at the click of a button. Once configured, monthly management accounts that previously took days can often be produced in minutes. Creative Computing works with you during implementation to map your existing reports and replicate them in the new solution, so you're not starting from scratch and your team can adopt the new approach with confidence.