[Podcast] Jet Reports
Updated: Aug 5, 2021
Season 1, Episode 3: Two Guys, Coffee & Business
Today we are talking Jet Reports. Jet Reports is known for delivering unparalleled data access through fast, flexible reporting and business analytics. Jet Reports has four main pillars: Financial Reporting, Business Analytics, Mobile accessibility, and Collaboration and Sharing.
With Financial Reporting you'll quickly and easily be able to generate timely, accurate financial reports in the format that works for you, right inside of Excel. Learn More
Business Analytics allows you to turn data into valuable insight with visually stunning dashboards and reports designed to help you quickly identify trends, spot anomalies and fix problems.
Mobile means working better and smarter, from anywhere. Liberate yourself from the office by getting the accurate business information you need, when and where you need it.
By Collaborating & Sharing you build cohesion and improve team output. Your data shouldn't live in a silo. Draw from accurate, governed data that everyone in the business can rely on for one version of the truth.
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00:00 on today's episode we're talking chat 00:03 reports to guys coffee and business 00:15 podcast hello everyone my name is 00:19 Michael and Trevor Tolo back with you 00:21 again and I'm here with Tom Dortch 00:23 the man Tom Dortch that's right so what 00:25 are we what are we drinking today Mike 00:27 today we have a nice cafe Calibri 00:30 cappuccino you know a little strong it's 00:36 got a little bit too much milk but we 00:38 won't fall cafe Cleary for that one 00:40 today we have Steven Keller house 00:43 Keller cost 10 homes just Keller halls 00:45 that'll work 00:47 that's K are you drinking buddy I'm 00:51 drinking my problems so you get a little 00:58 rum shot in your coffee oh yeah Irene 01:01 Tommy drink anything special today uh I 01:04 just got the good old water today oh 01:07 nice 01:08 keep that that throat nice and ready to 01:11 go of course the white pack at all in it 01:13 or anything I thought about it but not 01:16 this time 01:17 awesome all right so like I said we have 01:21 Stephen in the house today and he's uh 01:24 he's starting to learn about jet reports 01:27 so he's he's one of our I guess resident 01:30 experts for maybe Jeff professional 01:33 maybe not Jenn Enterprise yet no special 01:36 yeah Jeff professional but experts a 01:40 strong word but we can go with that nice 01:43 and we're gonna talk about Jeff reports 01:44 today because Tommy's noticed a lot of 01:48 what yes so uh what a big thing that 01:51 I've noticed when people are trying to 01:54 look to upgrade to a new ERP system is 01:59 reporting they just they can't seem to 02:01 get enough reports or it's just take it 02:05 too much time and they're going to into 02:07 Excel and 02:08 trying to create their purports all on 02:10 their own and it's just costly 02:13 money-wise and timewise yeah I bet when 02:16 you have a lot of data - like you said 02:17 it's right and you're copying and 02:20 pasting you have to look for the data 02:21 pronate exactly human error you just you 02:24 don't even know anymore 02:25 yeah so Steve what do you think you 02:27 think chat reports can help solve a lot 02:28 of those problems or whatever yeah 02:30 definitely I started with debt reports a 02:33 few months back took one of those 02:36 training courses they had and it it's 02:39 considered as essentially you know you 02:41 have your basic Excel formulas think of 02:44 jet reports as Excel formulas on 02:47 steroids it's a very powerful and 02:50 efficient tool if used properly for 02:53 recording through like Microsoft 02:55 Dynamics NAV pulling that information 02:56 and then generating a pretty quick 02:59 response if again utilized properly so 03:03 nice not you get like a game to print 03:04 out a sheet or whatnot of all the 03:06 different formulas or kind of just based 03:09 off your Excel experience or what well 03:12 with that they actually have with the 03:14 jet ribbon that it's an excel add-in and 03:17 then once you input it in it has a 03:21 wizard that gives you the basic formulas 03:24 and then how to create them and craft 03:26 them and then over time you'll learn the 03:28 basic syntax of those formulas and you 03:31 can just type it in just like you would 03:32 like maybe an if statement in a formula 03:35 and it actually jet reports it's really 03:38 great in the sense that it allows for 03:40 excel formula formulas to work 03:43 seamlessly essentially with the jet 03:46 formulas so they can actually talk and 03:48 work with each other the one thing I 03:50 will say a keynote as my one jet Reports 03:53 trainer told me is it won't work with 03:56 macros very well so if you have any it 03:59 can get kind of fuzzy when working with 04:01 macros because jet reports itself some 04:04 of those formulas kind of are macros I 04:06 guess I guess in a sense so if you have 04:09 your own trying to clash with them when 04:11 you try to run a report you can get some 04:13 problems developed yeah which makes 04:17 sense because I know that 04:19 Microsoft Dynamics NAV doesn't run well 04:21 with necks by itself via that there is 04:24 to be a special connector for it for you 04:26 to access it work with work with an Ani 04:28 a Mac or Mac or do what I call write 04:33 anything go ahead to that my friend yeah 04:37 just so it seems like the average person 04:40 who has excelled abilities and has been 04:44 trying to run all their own reports in 04:45 Excel can continue to do use Excel and 04:49 use their Excel skills but it's a lot 04:51 easier now and more user-friendly it's 04:54 kind of definitely so then when you're 04:56 using chat reports with with nav can you 05:00 give us a little bit of a rundown of 05:02 let's say how it would work so if you're 05:04 in nav what do you do do you click a 05:06 button and Excel automatically opens up 05:09 just the basics you know high level a 05:12 really basic one is honestly you just 05:14 open Excel and a word spread Excel 05:17 spreadsheet and then if you already have 05:19 the add-in put in in Excel do you just 05:22 go to the jet ribbon you know you have 05:24 the home view the insert ribbon to go to 05:26 that and essentially from there once 05:30 that ribbon is already in there it 05:32 automatically has all that information 05:34 ready to go they also have a table 05:37 builder view where you can view all the 05:40 tables in nav so you can get a 05:42 high-level view of all these tables like 05:44 vendor the vendor table and all the 05:46 fields that are associated with it like 05:48 name address city all of those things 05:51 and then you can literally go to using 05:54 the NL function which is one of the key 05:56 functions and then literally say all 05:59 right show me all rows from this table 06:02 from the vendor table show me all names 06:05 show all of our vendors and then you can 06:08 filter those filter those values based 06:12 on a show me only vendors with a certain 06:16 amount of prepayment already put in or 06:19 show me once that just recently became a 06:22 vendor 06:24 there's multiple filters that you can 06:25 apply the kids those are almost SS for 06:27 for reporting live yeah right my 06:29 question is is this data is it all 06:31 real-time data so in that regards it 06:35 there's two ways to have that real-time 06:37 data a lot of people in their nav 06:39 environments will always have constant 06:41 updates to inventory management and 06:44 stuff like that so there's two ways to 06:47 run these reports once you have your 06:49 report built is using the report 06:51 function which uses cached information 06:53 from jet from nav every time you for 06:58 example every time you open a jet report 07:01 Excel workbook it will automatically 07:03 refresh the data essentially unless you 07:06 specify otherwise but it will always 07:07 refresh the data when you first open it 07:09 up then every time you run report it 07:12 will use that cached information at that 07:14 time you opened it up say however you 07:17 were working on it for 30 minutes and a 07:19 bunch of inventory came in there's 07:21 another button that says call 07:23 prefreshman and that will give you real 07:25 time data at that moment you run it and 07:27 then the difference is you would run the 07:31 Refresh when you need that real-time 07:33 information at that point it will take 07:36 longer to run the report because it has 07:39 to pull back new information but running 07:41 report will just use cached information 07:43 so depends on your environment not 07:46 what's uh it's a hard to access these 07:50 reports can they be accessed from 07:51 anywhere is there a special option to 07:54 want any type of web and just access to 07:56 reports from serving maybe a customer 07:58 portal or something or one right yeah so 08:00 depending on the licensing structure you 08:02 have you there is a web portal where 08:05 you're able to view those Excel 08:06 worksheets say you don't even have Excel 08:09 on your computer or you're just using 08:11 like one at a hotel or whatever and they 08:13 don't have Excel you have the Wi-Fi you 08:15 have internet you can go on to the jet 08:17 warp web portal in a web browser and 08:20 actually view those reports and then 08:22 actually see those results of those web 08:26 reports that's great that's great yeah 08:28 that's why I understand that's pretty in 08:29 your future 08:30 within the last I want to say here a 08:32 little bit more I'm not sure I wouldn't 08:35 be able to give you specific dates or 08:37 anything like that but I would say it's 08:39 relatively new 08:40 definitely definitely anything you want 08:42 to add to it I'm kind of curious about 08:46 about scheduling reports is that is that 08:50 is that another feature that's available 08:51 order right so my first go in with jet 08:56 reports was actually using something 08:59 called the dynamic batch scheduler dart 09:01 reports has a great thing where they 09:03 actually provide templates for certain 09:06 types of reports to build and one is 09:08 their dynamic batch scheduler so say you 09:11 have four for the example that I'm going 09:13 to use that I used for the company was 09:16 pre payment invoices we want jet reports 09:20 to automatically send emails to all of 09:24 our customers who have pre payment 09:26 balances with us every Friday at a 09:30 certain time and check every time you 09:33 see check every Friday before you run 09:36 this report to see if they still have a 09:39 prepayment balance with us and to do 09:41 this automatically without someone 09:42 having to hit go into itself hit run and 09:45 then do this so with the dynamic batch 09:47 scheduler you do need there is some 09:49 configuration work you have to put into 09:51 it but you can have it run sent us 09:54 specified people for each company and 09:58 then say it's 10:00 a.m. you set it to 10:02 run at 10:00 a.m. 10:02 it'll send 20 30 50 50 customers there's 10:08 specific invoice reports like all right 10:10 so here is your pre payment balance 10:12 here's the invoices or all the ones you 10:15 added to that balance at this time and 10:19 it's it's a dynamic way of just having a 10:24 complete process automated it was 10:26 something beforehand we didn't use that 10:28 would take take to mainly input new 10:32 people into the task scheduler many many 10:36 hours so this is probably saved I would 10:39 at least say maybe five to seven hours 10:42 week yeah having to channel of course in 10:45 long yeah check nav and look at those 10:47 invoices it almost sounds like from our 10:49 last podcast artificial intelligence it 10:51 might be able to use a little bit 10:53 artificial intelligence in the future 10:54 and right or it just reads what 10:57 customers have what and you don't have 10:58 to enter any data and it'll send out the 11:01 the the building or whatever based on 11:04 their open rates from the past so to 11:06 send it out exactly at the best time 11:08 that that it thinks it most likely to 11:11 get open or whatnot that's pretty cool 11:14 like the interests on the future yeah 11:15 definitely 11:17 alright so if you had to pick right now 11:19 would you pick if you're starting a 11:23 small business power bi or jet reports 11:27 going right into this one are we right 11:30 back good I will say I had was closer 11:33 start I have a power bi guy I love power 11:36 bi I love which are reports to but for 11:39 smaller businesses I kind of think power 11:40 bi is the way to go just mean I will say 11:43 a small disclaimer myself 11:45 I've done a little bit of work with 11:47 power bi but my main focus has been jet 11:49 reports so I'm kinda for jet reports I 11:54 guess to show my bias the experience of 11:57 I had with power bi specifically with 12:00 data refreshes has been a bit of a 12:03 struggle I certainly don't doubt the 12:06 ability of the reporting tool dead or 12:09 refresh just with large amounts of data 12:10 Laurie yeah I try to set up a data 12:14 gateway with refreshes of the reports 12:17 and the data sets and have that 12:19 automated an automated process just like 12:22 the automated process we had set up for 12:23 here I will say I feel like jet reports 12:30 is more intuitive if you have that excel 12:32 background it just feels a more natural 12:35 I looked at some of the I think ten 12:39 reports as more capabilities on part of 12:40 you know so but yeah when it comes to 12:44 actually creating reports and power bi I 12:47 think it takes a little bit more time to 12:49 try and understand the syntax coding 12:52 scent 12:53 of using it but again I haven't seen all 12:57 the capabilities of power bi so but my 13:01 personal recommendation is jet reports 13:03 but again I do have a bias so we all do 13:07 you're the tiebreaker well yeah so my 13:12 personal experience I would say depends 13:15 upon your business 13:16 it does depend upon your business 13:18 everybody's different 13:19 but personally I I'm more familiar with 13:23 Excel yeah I met reports kind of person 13:26 myself complicated young fellas yeah I 13:29 was seeing about grabbing my popcorn 13:31 here I was thinking this could be a 13:32 quick little Feud never-never night they 13:37 both work wonders it all depends on what 13:39 you like and what you need before yeah 13:40 well Steven you kind of brought up 13:43 another point that I wanted to ask so 13:47 you don't really need a whole lot of 13:48 programming skills for jet reports to 13:51 modify the reports yourself 13:53 whereas the power bi I feel like you 13:56 kind of do need a little bit more I 13:59 don't know is its own language right it 14:01 has its own language yeah my my correct 14:04 and I would definitely say so another 14:08 neat tool thank you for bringing that up 14:11 the table builder I discussed earlier 14:15 the table viewer you can actually pull 14:18 an exact table like say you want vendor 14:21 and it lists all the fields you can 14:24 actually almost drag and drop an entire 14:26 table into into a cell and it'll auto 14:29 populate that entire the entirety of 14:33 that table however make sure you put in 14:35 filters or else it's going to show you 14:38 everything or it might crash but it's it 14:42 gives you a very it can hold your hand 14:44 if you want it to but you also have the 14:46 sense of you have free rein to do what 14:49 you want so I think it's easier to learn 14:54 with as a if you have no knowledge and 14:58 then it has like a nice training program 15:02 yeah so yeah yeah I feel like they're 15:05 both pretty easy to install with the app 15:08 safe within a day you get something up 15:09 and running right well my friend I have 15:14 nothing more for you I think you 15:15 answered a lot of the questions and a 15:17 lot of people who don't know about 15:19 reports and maybe want to get into it 15:21 you know I feel like I'm on my way to 15:23 becoming a an expert on myself now 15:26 laughter today mr. jet reports well I'd 15:33 say that about wraps it up again for 15:35 this week what do you think Tom yeah I 15:36 would say so and now I want to thank 15:38 Stephen for joining us today was a 15:41 pleasure 15:41 that's absolutely love to have you back 15:43 if you ever gets time absolutely thanks 15:45 for having me 15:46 sounds good all right everybody keep 15:48 doing what you're doing we're here for 15:50 solution systems Michael and Trevor Tolo 15:52 with Tom Dortch 15:54 and Steven Keller
Question: Do you think your organization would benefit from Jet Reports? If so, why? Leave your answers in the comments section below.