Reporting within Infor continues to be an area where users are looking for greater functionality. Fortunately, Infor remains responsive to the community and committed to enhancing software capabilities. The latest feature to receive improvements is none other than GL Report Designer.
This finance-first tool recently received several updates that your teams will greatly benefit from understanding.
To get caught up on the latest, join RPI’s Chris Gordon and Ian Sauter for an in-depth review of Infor GL Report Designer’s newest functionality. Session attendees will get a first-hand look at: · Column-level and filter enhancements
- Column-level and filter enhancements
- Layout improvements, including group headers, page numbering, and more
- GL Report Designer’s compatibility with Birst for advanced report formatting
- Real-world use cases for maximizing the application
If you’re looking for greater visibility into your financial reporting, this webinar is for you.
Transcript
Chris Gordon
Welcome to our webinar on Infor GL Report Designer. This is our third time getting together to talk about GL Report Designer since it first came out in April of 2023. We’ve covered things like lessons learned, best practices, and how we see the product being used. We’ve done some demos.
Today we’re going to do something a little different. We’ll still cover the key product feature releases that we love, but we’re also going to talk about how you can layer Birst on top of your GL Report Designer reports to level up the look and feel — which, as we’ve come to learn, can significantly improve user acceptance.
Over the last year or so, we’ve seen a pretty significant adoption of GL Report Designer among the clients we’re working with — both brand-new organizations implementing Infor and existing Lawson customers moving to Infor CloudSuite. Today we want to share our observations on where we’ve seen Birst become a big value-add to the GL Report Designer product, and we’ll take it from there. My name is Chris Gordon. I manage the RPI finance team of consultants, and I’m happy to be joined by Ian Sauter, one of our finance consultants. Ian, do you want to say hi and kick us off?
Ian Sauter
Sure. Hi everyone. My name is Ian Sauter, as Chris said. I’ve been with RPI for two years, based out of Washington, DC, and I’m excited to talk about some of the new things GL Report Designer has to offer.
To start, we wanted to discuss some of what has come to GL Report Designer in the last year or so and show how far it’s come since it was first introduced as a reporting product within Infor CloudSuite. Some of the big ones: column-level filtering has advanced quite a bit since the release of GL Report Designer — we’ll talk about that more on the next slide. There are a lot of different options for how we can set up columns to report: year-to-date, life-to-date, beginning balance, prior-year operators, and more. Calculated columns have been added as well, so you can do pretty sophisticated calculations within GL Report Designer without much backend development. And then there’s composite reporting and page numbers, which we’ll also cover on the next slide.
Chris Gordon
Let’s take a look at a couple of those.
Ian Sauter
Starting with one of the newer features: group headers for smart data organization. What this allows you to do is have multiple headers with the same name looking at similar data, but filtered on something like a different company or a different department within your organization. You can title and group those differently within your report — it gives you a bit more flexibility. You’re not constrained to one header per column.
Moving into enhanced column filtering: there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to what we can filter on. We can filter by scenario type — budget, actual, or multiple budgets grouped into one column. There’s a lot you can do there. You can also filter by dimension type, account type, all of that’s available — and it’s as simple as a click of a button, without much backend development involved.
To finish out, composite reporting is a newer feature and we’ve seen a lot of improvements there across the last few releases. Essentially, this allows you to combine multiple reports into one. You can have board packages all combined into one singular report — when you run it, it kicks out all those reports together. It’s definitely a big one.
Chris Gordon
Ian, you’ve been doing a ton of report development primarily in the public sector for the last year, year and a half. Are these features things you’re actively building today? Multiple column filtering, group headers, composite reporting — are those adding value?
Ian Sauter
Definitely. We’ve seen each of these come into play recently with reports we’ve been developing for clients. Group headers is a big one — clients often have reports in their old system with different groupings, and we can now replicate those in GL Report Designer. Column filtering comes into almost every report we develop, some more complicated than others — that’s probably the biggest one. And composite reporting as well, particularly for those board packages, or when they want differing row structures between sections of the report.
Chris Gordon
It’s great to see those new enhancements and features that clients can benefit from.
All right — we teased this earlier, but what we’ve discovered is the ability to layer Birst on top of your GL Report Designer reports. Ian, do you want to share what that means and what value it provides to customers and clients using GL Report Designer?
Ian Sauter
Definitely. This has been huge with some of the recent report development we’ve been doing out of GL Report Designer. So essentially, GL Report Designer reports are Birst reports on the back end. When we create them within FSM, they’re being created in Birst as well — GL Report Designer is just a shortcut that provides a user-friendly interface for building the report itself.
Through that, we found that you can actually access these reports from within the Birst space. And where that’s really gone a long way is with report formatting. When it comes to making reports look polished within GL Report Designer, we’re somewhat limited in our out-of-the-box options — but Birst lets us take it to the next level. We can do a lot there. Moving formats between environments is pretty seamless. And the nice thing is, if we have a drillable report out of GL Report Designer, we can format it up to a board-level standard and it’s still drillable even after that.
Chris Gordon
You don’t lose that capability — which is great.
In your experience on projects, we gather a report inventory for a client and then designate a future-state technology for each one — whether that’s Birst, App Studio, list views, or GL Report Designer. Does adding the Birst formatting component increase the number of reports that GL Report Designer can now handle? Which ultimately makes things easier to maintain, since GL Report Designer is a bit easier on the end user than App Studio.
Ian Sauter
Most definitely. One of the biggest hurdles with GL Report Designer — as you said, when we were going through that early report scoping on a project before we implemented this process — was the formatting piece. A lot of times the reason we couldn’t do a report out of GL Report Designer was that it needed to be presentable to commissioners, the board, and so on. That pushed us toward App Studio or straight Birst development, which as we know is a lot more time-consuming and much harder to enable clients on by comparison.
Since we’ve brought this approach along, there are a lot more reports we see early in a project where we can now say: this is something we can do out of GL Report Designer with Birst formatting. It’s going to save time and make the maintenance process a much more seamless experience for the client.
Chris Gordon
Should we go take a look at what we’ve been able to do with Birst?
Ian Sauter
Let’s take a look.
Chris Gordon
Setting the stage with a real-world example: we had a client who needed to present a report to the board commission and it had to look good. The delivered formatting in GL Report Designer was deemed unsuitable for that level of presentation. That typically means exploring App Studio or Birst — both a heavier lift. By inserting Birst into the GL Report Designer workflow, we were able to meet that requirement. Ian, can you walk us through what we’re looking at here and how this differs from a standard GL Report Designer report?
Ian Sauter
Sure. A lot of the data in this report we could get straight out of GL Report Designer — that wasn’t the issue. But when we first showcased it to the client, they said this wasn’t something they could send to their commissioners. One of the reasons: out of the box, text in GL Report Designer comes out green. You don’t really have choices around bolding or how you can visually separate columns. You can see those column group headers at the top — that’s out-of-the-box GL Report Designer. But the bolding, the text coloring, and the column dividers — those were added through Birst.
This next example had a bit more to it. The underlines — that’s not something out of the box in GL Report Designer, so that was added. The way totals are displayed, bolded and organized the way they are, is another addition. A big one we’ve seen is row sorting. This report was sorted by department and account. Within GL Report Designer, you’re somewhat constrained in how it sorts and displays rows. We were able to change the sort into a way the client preferred and felt was more presentable.
Chris Gordon
As I mentioned earlier, we’re seeing increased user adoption of GL Report Designer over the last year. I think part of that has to do with the Birst component making reports look good. A critical acceptance point for clients is that first visual — you eat with your eyes first. The data might be right, the layout might be fine, but if it doesn’t have that finished look you need to send to the board or to leadership, it’s a problem. This solves that.
I also think GL Report Designer is just easier — at least easier than App Studio or straight Birst development — and it empowers the accounting and finance teams to go build their own reports. Typically a little bit of training and you’re off to the races. That’s another reason we’re seeing more and more organizations move to GL Report Designer — not for everything, but for specific report types. Ian, what are you seeing as the repeat types of reports that tend to land in GL Report Designer?
Ian Sauter
Starting from the top: board package reports, as we discussed earlier. That’s a great combination of GL Report Designer and Birst — composite reports that allow us to deliver multiple reports in one export, formatted to that board-level standard. Then there are year-end reports. I’ve been seeing a lot of demand for year-end reports through GL Report Designer. These need to look presentable, they can be used for audits, and they fit well with this approach. And then your more generic budget-to-actual reports, trial balances — all of that can come out of GL Report Designer. If you need additional formatting on top, that’s where you layer Birst in.
Chris Gordon
Another component worth noting, Ian, is that Infor has been putting real time and effort into continuous development of this product over the last two years — pushing out both large and small releases. We expect that to continue, and we’ll stay on top of it as a company and bring you the latest updates. That’s our job and we love doing it. Hopefully this webinar was a useful way of showcasing the latest we’ve experienced with GL Report Designer. That’s it for us — Ian, any closing thoughts before we wrap up?
Ian Sauter
Just to agree completely with you, Chris — this really does seem to be Infor’s path forward when it comes to GL reporting. A lot is being invested in this product, and there are big changes to come. Definitely worth getting with the times and moving along with it.
Chris Gordon
If anyone has questions, please email them to questions@rpic.com. We appreciate your time. We’re always here for you — reach out if you need us.
