You have been using the Dynamics GP solution for some time and have captured valuable data about your customers, vendors and financial operations. Now you want to draw some useful insights from this information. You want the answers to questions such as the following:

• Who are our most profitable customers?
• What products are these customers buying?
• Are they buying more (or less) from us this year versus last year?
• What is our margin by customer and by product?
• Who are our top salespersons?

With the GP Analysis Cubes, the answers to these questions are just a few clicks away.

Here’s the Pivot Table created from the Sales cube that contains the top 10 customers by Sales. The report also includes Cost of Sales and Gross Profit. You could also sort the Pivot Table by Gross Profit.

Once you have this basic report, you are ready for further analysis by slicing and dicing the data. For example, you want to know what products these top 10 customers purchased. Simply drag the product dimension next to the Customer dimension. Here’s the resulting report.

Now you want to compare this year’s sales for your top customers against the last year’s sales. Simply, drag the year dimension to the columns area and select the years you want to compare.

As you can see from the report, Office Design Systems Ltd and Vision Inc. are the brand new customers this year who made the top 10 customers list. You also notice that some of the last year’s top customers have dropped off the top 10 list this year.

If you would like to see the underlying details for a given cell in the report, you can drill down by double clicking on the cell. A new worksheet will display the detailed transactions that make up the result in the cell as shown in the following screen shot.

Conclusion: Your Dynamics GP system captures a lot of valuable data about your business and you can use it to your competitive advantage with the tools you already know and use.