Ideal usage of Business ReporterΒΆ
Business Reporter allows users to create powerful reports in Excel making use of a combination of core Excel and Business Reporter functionality.
There is always a trade-off between the complexity and performance of a report designed using any reporting tool. Business Reporter is no different. Based on performance benchmarking tests, Business Reporter works well when rendering up to 400k cells. More data can be processed but performance and reliability will become an issue. Excel while very flexible, renders each cell individually and so as more rows and columns are added, processing times increase quickly. This limit is acceptable for the use cases for which Business Reporter is meant for, namely financial reporting & planning with writeback to IFS. The above benchmarks are the performance levels that can be achieved under ideal conditions and with good design practices. Actual performance may vary depending on the specific configuration and usage scenario eg: heavy use of excel features such as Excel formulas, BR features such as sheet repeaters, pivots in non-BR sheets etc
More information on performance tuning in Business Reporter can be found here.
As the data culture of your organization matures, it is important to choose tools that can scale with large amounts of data, help you gain insights, and make data-driven decisions. IFS Advanced Analytics and IFS Analysis models use the same Information Sources as IFS Business Reporter. They have prebuilt content and are designed to be easy to tailor to your business needs. They allow you to access much larger data sets and process this data far more quickly.