5 Reasons You Need to Add Atlas to Microsoft Dynamics

Originally created in the 1890s, the Swiss army knife was a logical solution to officers’ need to be able to repair their weapons, open their canned food, and cut things as needed. Since then, simple items that offer multiple solutions to achieve a goal are often referred to as being the Swiss army knife of their kind.

If that’s the case, then Atlas for Microsoft Dynamics just might be the Swiss army knife of Microsoft Dynamics data: Atlas solves data integration, operational reporting, and data upload challenges all in one easy-to-use package. Not only that, it does so simply. With Atlas’ ability to simplify these time-consuming and tedious tasks, you reduce the load on IT resources and achieve business results faster for less cost. All this adds up in free time that you can now use to focus on higher value activities.

“With Atlas, we were able to build reports in-house that would have cost us thousands of dollars in consulting. Even when our partner told us they could not create the report in D365, we were still able to build it with Atlas. Additionally, we were able to provide reporting to our finance team direct from D365, in real-time, instead of having to wade through Power BI to get the information.” – Robert Funke, IT Director, ELITE Comfort Solution

The Swiss Army Knife of Microsoft Dynamics Data

Atlas is so much more than a data migration tool. Flip it open and see what other functions this tool features for transforming your Dynamics deployment:

1. Create financial and operational reports with real-time drill-down
Atlas makes it easy for you to create custom financial and operational reports inside any Office document that perfectly meet the needs of your organization. If you need some help getting started, Atlas includes more templates than standard out-of-the-box reporting options to get you up and running quicker. It connects to any Dynamics module, not just the GL, to support your company-wide reporting needs. And, with real-time integration into Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, it’s easy to drill down from summary to transactions to quickly identify and fix data integrity and reconciliation issues.

2. Schedule when your reports will automatically refresh

Atlas makes it easy to keep your operational reports up to date. You can schedule Atlas reports to refresh automatically, pulling the latest data from Microsoft Dynamics  and other data sources. This puts you in control of when and how you distribute information to your decision makers.

3. Execute Microsoft Dynamics changes without ever leaving Excel

Your client’s sales team is conducting a pipeline review in PowerPoint and wants to change the close date for an opportunity. Your finance team is working through their month end account balances in Excel and needs to create an adjustment journal to correct an expense that was posted as revenue. Your sales operations team is also working in Excel to calculate commissions and needs to post these back to Microsoft Dynamics. With Atlas, you can upload all these changes directly from the source; no need to switch back to Microsoft Dynamics.

Atlas’ writeback data, whether new or existing, is subject to all previously-established Microsoft Dynamics access rights and user privileges. This means you can be sure all data loaded is correct and error free, while at the same time making people across your organization more productive.

4. Bring your BI dashboards to life with live data

Atlas can feed data into any dashboarding tool, including Power BI. By using Atlas as the source for your BI queries, you don`t need to invest in a big, expensive, and risky data warehouse project in order to answer questions like:

• • • How is my production output doing this week against target?
    • What kind of purchases have I made in my top 3 product categories this week?
    • Which site is running lowest on ‘Product X’?
    • Which fixed assets are close to reaching the end of their life cycle?

Thanks to Atlas’ live connection, you can refresh data in operational dashboards in real-time, ensuring that decision-makers have access to critical information whenever they need it. Set up exception alerts to highlight issues early on for decision makers. With Atlas’ drill-down capabilities, they can dig deep into the live data to understand the root cause and take corrective action right away.

Compare this to the alternative, which requires expensive dedicated IT resource to monitor and maintain a data warehouse that is only updated periodically, forcing users to make operational decisions based on stale data. Atlas’ superiority is immediately evident.

5. Speed up data integration between Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, CRM, and other systems

With Atlas you can merge data from Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, CRM, and other systems into one Excel worksheet. Whether you have your Microsoft Dynamics data in the cloud or on-premise, or simply want to combine third party data with Microsoft Dynamics to see a bigger picture, Atlas is the easiest and fastest way to achieve this. No need for an expensive data warehouse. No need for an army of coders. Just simply point and click to arrange data to support all your reporting and analysis needs.

You can even push data to Power BI to visualize your data through dashboards. This alleviates the data gathering challenges facing most Power BI projects and leaves users with more time to focus on creating high-value visualizations that provide real insights to decision-makers.

Improve Your Dynamics Value

So no matter what version of Microsoft Dynamics you’re running—AX or 365 for Finance and Operations—Atlas give you all the tools you need to save time and money and empower users to deliver more business value from your Microsoft Dynamics investment. Click here to schedule your FREE demo today.