Jet Reports Comparison from Free to Full Throttle (Webinar Recording)

TRANSCRIPT

Tess: Okay, good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Tess Hallgrimson, and I’m a marketing coordinator here at Encore. We’ve got Janice Taylor here today from Jet Reports, and she’ll be presenting, “Jet Reports Comparison from Free to Full Throttle.” We’ll be sure to leave some room at the end for questions, so feel free to type your questions into the side panel at anytime and Janice will address these at the end. We’ll be sending a recording out afterwards to everyone who registered for today’s webinar. So, I think we can get started and I’m gonna pass it over to you now, Janice.

Janice: Thanks, Tess. And if you’d make me presenter, I’ll show my screen. There we go. Thanks everyone. And if you have not used GoToMeeting before, and you’re finding the control panel is kind of obscuring your screen, you should be able to see a toolbar to the side of it with an orange box with a white arrow. If you click on that arrow, it will minimize the control panel. You’ll also notice that there’s room to add a question on the chat in case there’s something that comes up that you wanna tell us about very quickly, you know, perhaps you’re not getting the audio or you have a question, you could put it there as well. And then for sure, at the end of the session, we are going to answer your questions. This presentation is going to last approximately 45 minutes. So, with no further ado, I will get really started. And again, my name is Janice Taylor. I’m with Jet Reports. I’m actually located in their Canadian office in Toronto, but we do have Jet Reports in the States of course, and we may have some Jet Reports’ customers from the U.S. so, on board as well. So, welcome to everyone that’s here today.

Jet Reports was founded in about 2002, so I’ll just give you a little background. Founded in 2002, it is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. And I’m really excited because they just shifted offices a couple of weeks ago into new facility. And I’d love to see that facility because it sounds pretty darn nice. So, it’s long overdue. But we are an international company, we have about 11,000 companies in 94 countries using our product. And we have our 14 regional offices, as you can see with our map.

Now, my background with Jet Reports, and I’m an accountant by profession, and I was a customer. I started using Jet Reports back in 2005. And I really, really liked the product a lot. The product I was using it with was Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and I was trying to get information out of NAV and I couldn’t. We had 200 reports in them, but they weren’t answering my business questions. They were pretty generic reports and when I started using Jet Reports, I could really get out the data I wanted to see. And I think one of the biggest benefits was we started understanding how to better use our ERP because we weren’t necessarily putting in good data ourselves. So, it helped us to get better value out of the ERP we were using, and certainly our reporting vastly improved.

And we went way past the standard reporting on doing financial reports. There were a lot of operation reports, we started to develop, controller’s reports, exception reports that we were building out. It really made a difference to our company. It saved our company money and it helped us understand our business so much better, and I was so appreciative of the product. When Jet Reports talked to me in 2006, they suggested that I open up the Canadian office and I did in 2007, and it is been a blast working with Jet Reports and I can’t wait to tell you what’s been going on at Jets.

So, if you were with me at Encore’s presentations in the fall, we looked at some reporting tools and if you were there, you’d recognize some of these slides. We talked about what is Jet Reports, we looked at Jet Express for Excel. This is our free product and it’s free if you’re on GP 9 or later, or if you’re on NAV 2009 or later. It is absolutely free. Its sister companion is Jet Professional and to be honest, they’re actually the same product. When you download Jet Express, you’ve actually downloaded Jet Professional and we have just turned off the features that you have to pay for. Now, this sit in Excel and it’s an excel add-in. An add-in just means that as you can see here, you’re getting a new ribbon inside of Excel and it’s Jet, and it has all our tools in it and the ability to run the report and drill down on the report. So, it’s an Excel add-in and it’s actually fairly simple tool.

What it’s going to do is add four new functions into Excel. You know, when I say function when we add up a column of numbers and we use equal sum, that’s a function. So, functions always start with equal sign, they have a word following to kind of describe what that functions supposed to do, and then there’s a set of brackets. Inside the set of brackets, there’ll be parameters and Excel will execute on those parameters. And that’s what we’re doing for you with Jet. We’re giving you the ability to use the knowledge of Excel that you already have and further develop it with four new functions. And they’re pretty straightforward in using those functions.

The other product we have for reporting is called Jet Enterprise. Now, this is different. This is actually a software application and what we’re going to do is we’re going to pull your data out of whether you’re in AX, GP, NAV, CRM, other data sources, you can be in a payroll data source. You could have a simple Excel spreadsheets that you have data in there that you wanna report on. You might have Google Analytics you wanna report on or Twitter feeds and you wanna see those. You can do all that kind of data analysis through Jet Enterprise, you can pull it all together and you have it in one spot, and then you’re able to report on it.

What’s also nice about this is your data visualization. It can be Excel, or we can use products like Power BI, this is a big, big, I want to say marriage between the two products. Not exactly marriage, but this is a big thing for a lot of our customers. Now, we do have our own dashboard builder, which is similar to a Power BI for Jet Enterprise, but some folks really like the Power BI dashboards. The graphics are very, very exciting, they’re very crisp, and there’s companies that wanna work with Power BI.

The drawback of Power BI, however, is the backend of Power BI is very complex and it can be very difficult to use. And that’s where Jet Enterprise comes in as an awesome backend for Power BI. Now, there’s other third-party tools you can tack on with data visualization that you can tack on to Jet Enterprise, but we see with most of our customers, they’re either wanting to report in Excel using the Jet Enterprise tool, they might wanna use our Jet dashboards, or they’re gonna use Power BI. That’s the most common that we’ve been seeing with customers. But again, you could tack on pretty much any third-party data visualization with Jet Enterprise and it’s gonna work.

We also talked about in the fall, because we had so many GP customers, we talked about comparing management report or FRX to Jet Express, our free product. And I suggested and I still do, if you go to YouTube and you look for Jet Reports and you look for Management Reporter versus Jet Reports, you will see a Microsoft MVP, most valuable professional, do it kind of a shootout between the two products. And she’ll talk about and she knows the Management Reporter inside out. She’ll talk about and show you what is like to build a report in Jet Express versus Management Reporter. And again, Jet Express is free.

Now, I’m gonna say to you if you’re on Management Reporter and it’s working really well for you, do you need to replace Management Reporter? And I’m gonna say no, I mean, I think most people are aware Management Reporter is going to be sunset by Microsoft eventually in, I think it’s around 2026. And they’re not developing that product any further. They’re still gonna support it, which means if there’s a new Excel that comes out or new Windows platform, they will certainly update Management Reporter to work with them. But they’re not going to develop the product any further. And that’s why Microsoft asked Jet Reports to make Jet Express available to GP users. That’s how that all came about. And we were so honored to be asked by Microsoft to do this. And it’s been a great partnership with Microsoft in supporting the GP customers who were looking to get off, as I said, FRX or Management Reporter.

Now, if you are using those products, and you’re really happy, and you’re saying, “Well, there’s no need for me to use Jet Express.” One of the benefits about Jet Express is it does more than just financial reporting. You can be able to report on any cable or view within GP and do some reporting. So, if you’re using payroll, for example, you could be using Jet Express to do some payroll analysis, or inventory, or accounts payable, or accounts receivable. All sorts of applications for Jet Express, and it’s free. So, think about, if you’re a GP on GP, think about it. Jet Express, it might be a great solution for you in getting you ready for the future for reporting. For our NAV customers, Jet Express is also available. Now, for GP, you have to be on GP 9 or later, for NAV, you need to be on NAV 2009 or later. But it’s also similar to how it works for GP. It’s gonna let you do financial reporting and it’s also gonna let you report on any other table in NAV.

Now, how could it be so free and so robust? Well, it is, but I’m gonna say here’s the limit on the robustness. The financial reporting, you can do your ad hoc layouts like you normally would, and it’s gonna be great. For the other reporting, we’re gonna help you build a master table in Excel and you’re gonna pivot table. We can’t do ad hoc layouts such as you see here. We can’t do ad hoc layouts with Jet Express. That’s where we draw the line. You also cannot schedule reports to run automatically on Jet Express. You know, we can’t give every one thing away, so we have some really good features in our sister product, the Jet Professional, that you’d wanna take advantage of if you have that robust reporting. And I’m gonna talk a little later about when should you pick one product over another? I’ll give you a good idea of what’s the best way to go with this.

We also talked about in the fall, most of you are aware there’s new product out there, Business Central, a cloud product from…a solution from Microsoft, and there’s a lot of interest in it. And we had a lot of folks asking us, “Do you have a reporting tool for it?” And the answer is yes. What you’ll see up in the Dynamics App Store is Jet reports financials for Business Central. Now, I’m gonna caution you, it only reports on financials. And one of the reasons is way back when Microsoft announced this product, and it was D365, originally they were only gonna do it for financials. So, that’s how we built out a product. But now, Business Central has come along, and it’s far more robust. It’s got lots of different tables and fields. It’s a full-blown NAV product up in the cloud. We do have a reporting solution for it, and I’m gonna talk about that in a minute.

We also had it install that you can access your data from anywhere. When you purchase Jet Professional, we give you the capability to build out your own web portal. It’s the Jet Web Portal. And what it’s doing is it’s a repository for your reports. Now, we don’t host it, you figure out the hosting yourself. All we’re doing is giving you the framework for it. It’s gonna let you access your reports from anywhere. So I always say, imagine you’re out in the coffee shop or taking a quick break or maybe you’re at lunch, and you don’t have your computer with you just have your phone and someone sends you an email or calls you and it’s an emergency and they need some information, financial information and you know you have a Jet Reports for it. Well, if you’ve stored it up on the portal, it’s not a problem because you just log in from your phone, you find that report, you can run the report and you can display the report. And so, you can get your answer.

In addition for our Jet Enterprise users, we have the dashboard tab there. So if you’ve created dashboards using our dashboard builder, they’ll be there as well. So, you know, that’s been a big addition to Jet Reports in the last couple years and our customers with us a long time. They’re pretty excited about having this Jet Web Portal to access the reports. It’s been a pretty good way to share reports and especially have them all in one location. It’s been quite helpful for a lot of our customers.

Who uses Jet Reports? I’ve shown this slide before, you’ll recognize a lot of names, and I think things that are really important to me because I’m an accountant by profession, and I wanna know what the impact is for doing a software implementation. Why would I wanna do it? And I like to see things where customers tell us that they’ve seen revenue growth of over 32% because they’re using a product like Jet Reports, and I can tell you just as a customer in my customer days, I definitely saw that with our company that we saw growth, we saw cost savings, we saw operational efficiencies from using Jet Reports because we had better information at our fingertips.

We have, on our website, we have case studies in our resource library and customer success stories, and I encourage you to go and see them, have a little Look at them. If you’re not using Jet, you might wanna go and do that. We have customers using AX, NAV, GP and they’re all target and other databases actually. But most of our customers are dynamics customers and you’ll see them talking about Jet Reports and what a difference it made to them. And, you know, you see this one from Rossmore Management, he had reporting efficiency improvements of 70%. ATC Turkey, I think that’s supposed to be turnkey, autonomous reporting with a 60% increase in team efficiency. And so, our CEO from…CFO from Royal Oaks Retirement simplified their reporting using Jet Reports and replacing Management Reporter. So, there’s lots of good information there. If you wanna hear what customer’s saying, please, go to our main website, jetreports.com, look at that resource library and have a look at what our customers are saying.

We also have some awesome video interviews with customers where they’re talking about Jet Reports. So, I also wanna talk about what’s new from Jet Reports. Oh, we have some surprises. This has been an exciting year for us. Not only did we make the big move, we’ve done some lot of big changes internally. And we have more coming than I can’t even tell you about. But here’s some of our surprises I can tell you about. We have a new release coming out in, actually, in a couple of weeks. And it’s our Jet 2019 product. And I got here because our customers said so.

Now, I want to talk about Jet Reports and how it’s changed as a company. We have a user experience team. In the business, you say it’s a UX team. What I really like about these people, they work tightly with our customers to help us understand what would make our product better. Their whole goal is to make our products delightful for our customers to use, and they do use the word delightful. They want it to be a really good experience. So they’ve talked to our customers and they’ve been making some improvements along the way. And if you’ve been using Jet, you’ve been seeing some of them. For example, now you can run a report in the background in Excel and continue working in Excel while that report’s running. For some customers, when it’s a huge report and you’re asking Jet to look at huge tables and bring a lot of data together, sometimes that report can be more than a few minutes running, and while it’s running we can’t use your Excel. Well, we fix that. So now, you can.

So, that was a nice improvement that came in the last release, but in this new release that’s coming out, wow, they rewrote Jet under the hood and we have way faster performance on Jet. It is written with this XLL because apparently right now it’s an XLM. They went to XLL and to multi-thread it’s functionality and that is giving a huge boost in performance. So, that’s a big one and I’m hearing some really good reports on that one. The other thing that we have in here, tada, you can actually use Jet Professional now with Business Central data source. So, this is a good big improvement in our Business Central customers are asking…were asking us, “Please, we need Jet Professional. We’d like Jet Financials, but we’re doing more reporting than just financial reporting.” So, we now have a connection for our Business Central customers.

We have an updated report wizard, this would only mean something to you if you are using Jet Reports and have been using it for a while. You know that our report wizard is an old tool for us. Well, we gave it a facelift and it’s much easier use, it makes more sense. So, that has been improved and our customers are happy about that. We’ve added a little notification when a new version of Jet Reports is available. One of the things that we find for customers is sometimes they’re asking us questions and we ask them what version of Jet are they on, and it’s such an old version of Jet. Now, we’re going to have a notification to let you know when a new version of Jet is available, and if you don’t want that notification on, you can turn it off. That’s not gonna be a problem. But with time, we let our customers know when a new version is available because not everyone reads newsletter, right? So, it can give you that opportunity to find out what’s new in Jet.

And if you’re writing Jet Reports, this will make sense to you. When you’re writing Jet Reports and you wanna write it, you’re the designer and you want to write it for viewers who are not designers. You know that in cell A1, you have to put plus values in there to turn it into report for viewers. “Well, you know what,” customers said, “why don’t you just automatically put that in there because I keep forgetting to add it in myself?” So, we did. So, that makes it much easier and then you can just turn it off if you don’t need it. But honestly, in most cases, you’re like 99.9% of the case, y’all want the plus values there. So, we added it in.

We have renamed the Jet Web Portal, the Jet Hub. And it’s just keeping it more contemporary, more reflective of what it’s really about, because we have big plans for that Jet Hub in the future and we’re getting ready for it. Some of the things that we’ve done now is to allow you to update emails when you’re adding users to the Jet Hub. That becomes really important when you’re trying to schedule reports to email. We’re assigning data source permissions to users and groups within the Jet Hub. Now, unless you’re the administrator for the web portal, that probably will mean absolutely nothing to you, but it’s a big improvement and what it’s going to do is a currently the administrator has to control it in the Jet Administration Console. That’s where they add all the users. Now, they’ll be able to do. We’re working towards getting it fully functional. They’ll be able to do it through the Jet Hub, that’s eliminating the need to go into Jet Administration Console. So, that’ll be a big improvement. And I know that they are working on performance improvement in the Jet Hub as well, that’s pretty exciting.

Now, here’s my big, big news that I’m really excited about. Hopefully, you can see my drum roll here, and it’s not looking too crazy over the internet. But Jet has a brand new product. And if you were a customer, you would have been given an advanced preview invite for this. So we ran a webinar last week. But the big news coming from Jet Reports for this quarter is we have a tool now called Jet Budgets. Our customers asked for this, they’ve been asking us for years, “Please give us a budget tool. It would be so awesome if we could do budgets and reporting with Jet Reports.” And now, you can. So, this is a brand new product. In fact, it’s so new I only downloaded it yesterday and I’m still learning how to use it. But I’m excited by what I see. And I say this honestly, because in my prior career, I did budgets for 13 years at a community college. So, my expectations of what this, bare minimum, this product should be, were higher than most people. And I have to say, I am not disappointed in what I saw.

This is going to be a great basic budget tool for a lot of customers. And to give you an example, what I was looking for, in the community college that I worked in, I was budgeting for almost 400 departments and 70% of our expenses were salaries, and I had to do a lot of that calculation and so did the different schools within the college. We did the salary calculations and started with me, but when it went out to the schools, we had to do the salary calculation in detail and we had a couple of unions, we had management staff, non-union staff. We had to figure it all out in Excel. And my expectation was, I’d still be able to do that, but upload it to the budget and indeed this tool is going to let you do that. I’m very excited. It has workflow, which means you have an approval process. You can see here I took a screenshot, it allows you to put comments in as you’re going, it has email notifications. There’s lots of good features in this. I’m very impressed with it for a first release of this product and that is going to be available next month.

Now, highlights from it, let’s talk about it. It is web-based and so that means you can be in multiple locations and contributing to this budget. It is a flexible budgeting structure with user-created templates, so that you can keep using those templates over and over again, or share them with across your organization. We will eventually come out with templates. Now, I’m gonna say this is only for GP and NAV customers, right? And Business Central customer, I wanna be very clear about that. First, you can do your data entry in the web, or you can do it from an Excel and I was practicing that this morning seeing just how that work. That was pretty cool, how I could just do my spreadsheet in Excel and just push it up to the Jet budget.

The workflow helps manage process with deadlines, email notifications, attachments, support, and commenting. That was pretty nice to see. Reporting on numbers is simple and uses Jet functionality. And what do we mean by that? I can actually have my budgets still just sitting, the budget, this tool is sitting up in the Jet Hub and I can actually report from the Jet Hub into my Excel spreadsheet with my actual is coming from GP or NAV, coming in into that spreadsheet. Or I can push those budgets back up into NAV or GP and report that way. So, I have that flexibility, but I was really impressed. I thought why would I really care if I push that budget back up into NAV or GP, as long as I had the budget somewhere and I could control it. And had workflow approval on it, I’d be happy just to keep it up in the hub. So, that’s there for customers. And it’s pretty exciting new start.

I wanna say that this is not a CPM product and that, you know, corporate performance management. If you’re looking for a budget tool that allows you to do forecasting or trending, this isn’t the tool. We’re not there with that and I don’t know that we’d get that far with it. We just listen to what the customer said they needed. And again, and this is the very first product I’ve seen from Jet Reports that was totally customer-driven. So, we had our cut…we asked for a number of customers to work with us they’ve been working on it for months with Jet on this, getting this to work the way the customer said it needs to work. So we’re very proud of it and excited about this product coming out and we’ve be giving more information to Encore, so that they can help you with looking at this budget. And I’m certain we’re doing demos on it now.

The types of users you can have in the budget, you can have the budget owner who owns the structure and the process, you can have a budget approver, and you can have budget for contributors. So, you can have multiple people or departments working on their budgets and submitting them up for approval and it will pull all those numbers together. It was pretty exciting, it does multi-segment reporting and even for NAV customer dimension reporting, which can be really important because the budget tool in NAV is a little limited. So, this takes them beyond those limitations that you would experience with NAV.

With the licensing, this is a common question we get asked about this. As long as you have Jet Professional you can be using this product. So, any Jet user can participate, but the user has to be added to the service tier first. That just gets them into the Jet Hub so that they have the online access. If the budget’s gonna be up there so you need to be in there, so it’s pretty easy peasy.

Now, we’ve talked about a lot of products and we have a lot of ERPs, so what product…like what is a product that you could choose? Well, it does depend. So, if we look at our ERP, what’s available for GP customers? They can use the budget product, they can use Jet Express for Excel, they can use Jet Professional, or they can use Jet Enterprise. That’s available for our GP customers. Two products you can’t use, Jet Express for Word, Jet Reports Financials, they’re not for GP.

If you’re a NAV customer, definitely you can use the budget tool. We have Jet Express. That should say NAV 2015 or later. Jet Express for Word that allows you to create your own documents inside of NAV using Word. It makes for a much nicer layout than what you get out of NAV itself, that’s available. We have our Jet Express for Excel available. We have our Jet Professional and I say it has to be NAV 2005 Executables.

Now, Encore will understand what an executable is, most customers don’t, but I could be on NAV 2000, or NAV, I was gonna say 2004, as long as I had the NAV 2005 Executable, I could use Jet. So, you can have early versions of NAVs. The key here is do you have that executable? And a NAV customers after that, we can use Jet Professional. Jet Enterprise, it’s tough to be on NAV 2004 Service Pack 1 or later, and you can use Jet Enterprise.

I have lots of customers that are on older versions of their ERPs, whether it’s GP, NAV, AX, and they have all this legacy data and they don’t know what to do with it because they’re moving up to a new version of an ERP. While we tell you to park it in Jet Enterprise, because that just makes it so much easier then you don’t have to worry about getting that data into your new ERP solution, but it’ll be there for reporting, for historical reference, put it into Jet Enterprise, add in your new data source, so there’s a smooth transition here and your data is all combining together for your reporting, your trending, your analysis and it’s all there. So, that’s easy peasy with Jet Enterprise.

AX, the only product we’re gonna offer you is Jet Enterprise, and why is that? You know, why wouldn’t we give AX Jet Professional? Well, when you have Jet Enterprise, you are gonna get Jet Professional, but we’re gonna tell you that when AX, because it’s such a complex product, it has many, many tables. So, for example, if I was in comparison, looking at a customer table in NAV, it might take seven tables of AX to come up with the same information. So, that’s a lot of tables and a lot of places to go when you’re writing the report. And when you’re using Jet Professional or even Jet Express, one of the key things is you have to know where the data is in your data source. You have to know the tables, you have to understand what the tables are, and where the fields are to pull it together. We find with AX and we’re writing reports on a Jet Professional, depending what it is, they’re too slow. They bogged down too many places to go. But Jet Enterprise is completely different because we pull that data out of your data source and we’re going to put it into a data cubes and your reporting is much faster and much easier to use. So, that’s why we don’t have this stuff ready for AX.

Questions, I get questions for AX, is there going to be budget for AX? I’m not sure about that right now. As I said, this is a first release for this tool. We’re gonna get it down pat for GP and NAV customers first because that’s the bulk of our customers. We’re working with them. Perhaps in the future we’ll have something for AX. Can’t really commit to that at this time.

Business Central, what do you use for Business Central? You can use that Jet Reports financials or you can use now, you can use Jet Professional and you will be able to eventually use Jet Enterprise just working on that one, so that is coming. Now, if you’re D365 for finance and operations and the back of that is AX, you can use Jet Enterprise for reporting on that particular database. So, that is there for the AX customers that are moving to D365 for finance and operations. So that’s pretty exciting.

We also have some CRM customers that use Jet Reports and that’s pretty exciting. And I’m sorry, I need to cross that off. That’s a mistake. It’s not in the budget, but you can use it with Jet Professional and Jet Enterprise, it’s CRM. Now, I’m gonna caution you, CRM online, Jet Professional, maybe, maybe not. We do not have a connector for it. You’d have to find a connector, we work closely with CDATA, you may be able to do some online CDATA connectivity, but just be cautious that the connector can be quite expensive if you’re sprinting across the company. There are other workarounds for this, for CRM online. For CRM on-prem, not a problem. Lots of customers is using Jet Professional with CRM on-premise. Jet Enterprise, not an issue, whether it’s CRM online or CRM on-premise. We have connectors for it. And one of the good things I think to say about Jet Enterprise that I understand is happening is the…we have a partnership coming up with CDATA. We’re gonna have over 100 new connectors for Jet Enterprise to work with it.

But the question becomes, you know, when do I use Jet Express versus Jet Professional? How do I know if I shouldn’t be on Jet Enterprise? Well, how do I figure that one out? So, I have a little slide to help you with that one. Let’s have a look. If I’m doing strictly financial reporting, and I’m on Business Central, then I just need Jet Reports Financials, I don’t need anything else. And that’s very economic way to do that reporting. You could use just that tool instead. If you’re a small company and you’re on NAV or GP, and you’re really just doing sort of departmental reporting and it’s not really going anywhere, it’s just to, you know, maybe accounting departments, just doing their financial reporting or some analysis, then yes, you know what? Jet Express for Excel is probably a good tool for you and it’s free, right? It’s free. So yeah, if you’re a small company this is probably a good idea for you.

But if you’re multi-company and maybe multidatabase as well, I’ve got that on there. If you’re multidatabase, multi-companies, sorry, Jet Express for Excel is good, but you could also use Jet Professional and definitely Jet Enterprise. And I should have another space in here for multidatabase. Multidatabase, I’m gonna say, maybe for Jet Professional and it just depends on the reporting. The reason I’m saying maybe is, yeah, Jet Professional can report on many different data sources right within the same report. However, if speed and performance becomes an issue for you, then you definitely wanna be on Jet Enterprise because that is going to be much faster for you. And one of the reasons is, when you look at a product like Jet Enterprise where it is a software application, pulling data out of your data sources, when it pulls it through to the data cubes, it’s done a lot of calculation already. And it’s simple things like summing up an amount, it’s already done for you. You’re just going to request the result in your report. But when you’re using a product like Jet Professional, Jet Professional may have to go and get the data and put it in Excel’s memory, and then add up the results in Excel’s memory first before it presents it in Excel and that can make it a very slow running report. So, that’s when you really wanna go over to Jet Enterprise. If you’re looking for speed and performance, Jet Enterprise is the answer for you.

The other attribute that I think is worth considering is ease of use. Jet Enterprise is definitely the way to go. And the reason is as I started saying in Jet Express for Excel and Jet Professional, the first thing I need to know is where is my data. And for someone who’s been writing reports for many, many years, I will say like it seems scary at first, but I will say after a while you get used to what are the most common tables that you use for reporting, and if you’re intuitive that way and can work with that that’s fine. But I do have customers and even my own staff, they can’t figure that out. They are really puzzled and struggle with where’s the data that I need for reporting? But if you’re using a product like Jet Enterprise, all that information is already brought together for you in the background. So, for example, if you were reporting on sales and say you’re a NAV customer, our off the shelf product already has 10 tables pulling together for you. You don’t need to know where the data is, you just need to say, “Today, I’m reporting on sales.” You open it up and there it is. You’re gonna report on it. I’m going to show you Jet Enterprise in action in a moment.

The other things I wanna talk about to you is, or for you, is what your resources are. If you’re an AX, NAV, or GP customer, we have free report templates for you that come with Jet Professional and Jet Enterprise. So, that’s there for you. And that gets you up and running and you can see some of them are dashboard type reports, some of them are financial statement type reports, and we’re into other granules or modules of software in providing some data. So lots of different reports that you can see in here available to you. So, that’s there for you.

The other thing, oh yeah, I’ll show you this in a moment. The other thing we have is a great Jet Help Center. So, let’s go look at that first and then I’m gonna show you a report and I’m going to show you the new hub. Before I get into that, let me just make sure that you see this. We have our knowledge base, it’s a help center, and we have our information whether if you’re low on Jet financials, Jet Professional, Jet Enterprise. If you wanna join our community of other users, you can join our community and ask questions. If you need help with Jet, you can submit a request to support to get in here and we’ll be glad to help you.

Then let’s have a quick look at what kind of things that would you see in here for Jet Professional? Well, there’s information on installing, there’s information on configuring, there’s just some general documentation, what’s new in Jet Reports, there’s wonderful videos on how to use our products. We talked about creating reports, we talked about techniques, and if you’re still looking in installing, configuring we talk about that as well. These are short videos that help you out with it. But you can also do a search on any one of these techniques and we have step-by-step with screenshots, walking you through how to do some of this stuff. So, we have our documentation, we have report design, your first reports, we give you user guide. There’s lots of information that’s in here that’s really useful, some how-tos, some troubleshooting. And this is an older product that we had that we don’t use anymore. And if you’re using Jet Express you come right down here and here’s online help and Jet Express.

Now, as a free tool we don’t give you support, support’s a paid service that comes with Jet Professional. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t help you, if you have a question we’ll tell you if. You know, if you’re having an install issue, we’ll help you with that for sure. But anything else, we just don’t do support on Jet Express, but we give you lots of tips in our help center on Jet Express. Now, it’s a fairly straightforward tool, so this actually does a good job of helping customers understand the product, and there’s two pages of it, of links to different articles on how to use Jet. So, it’s pretty robust and even in here, we have how to videos. So we’re talking about how to create a Jet Express financial report. We walk you through it, we have some screenshots, we make it step-by-step, lots of good information.

Let’s go quickly at the Jet Hub because I have about five more minutes. I wanna show you what it looks like, the new one. I sign on, it’s got my…picks up my domain, my username, my password, and I go. And if you’re using the Jet Web Portal and you’re upgrading and you wanna upgrade, when you do the new install when this comes out, easy peasy. I had this all upgraded within two minutes, my Jet Web Portal, my Excel add-in, my service tier, and my Jet admin console. All upgraded within a couple of minutes.

So, what you’ll see in different here in the Jet Hub is instead of having tabs across the page, we have a drop down. So if I wanted to see my reports, I could see my reports. I could run my report and I have options here if I wanna change the date, I could change the date. Let’s just gonna run the reports. As you can see it’s running, it’s giving my status. If I wanna open that report, it’s done. If I wanna open the report I can come down here, I can open it. I can download it if I wanna just download it. I didn’t need Excel of course. I don’t have to have Jet, but I do need Excel to look at it or I can open Excel Online. And this is why you can be away from the office with your phone and not your computer and be able to see your reports. So, when I come over here, I can actually see the results of my report, and I’m seeing it to Excel Online. You’ll see Jet is not anywhere in the ribbon because Excel Online doesn’t allow add-ins. But I can run the report and see the results in Excel Online. So, it’s all there for me.

In the Jet Hub I was playing, I said earlier, I was playing with budgets because I’ve just got this tool, and was so excited and I was looking at it and I created one for GP and I’m just starting on it, so learning it. So, I can see here’s my overview. I made a sales budget and while this is gonna be a really productive company, and I approved it so I had a lot of fun with this and I looked at it and my work items and I could see my sales. Now, if I wanted to make a change to it, let’s pull it up here. Let’s have an idea. This is the one I was working with. So, here I am in Excel, right? This is an Excel workbook, where I had to start from this was within the budget tool and get the framework setup. And you can see, I don’t think you see it very well, but what’s in light grey is actually coming from the framework. I put in a bunch of numbers, so let me just boost this one up. Say it’s 1,000 some…maybe make a big one. And my number is going to change down at the bottom. So I’ve got all my segment reporting coming in here. If I come down to the bottom, there’s lots of codes in here with segment three, my number is gone up to a million or is that 10 million, 10,000,625.

Well, in my sales, in my budget and when we look at that, it was a 104. So, if I come back in here, and I look at this my work item here because I’m contributing it, and I look on my sales, and I say, “Undo my submit,” because I wanna do another one. And I come in here and I’m gonna save this report and I come into Jet and I’m going to…it’s not a run, so I should be able to oopsy, let’s go on my Jet. I was looking for my upload the budget. Now, why don’t I see that? Well, you know what? I’m gonna watch my time here. And as I said, I just started learning this this morning, so let me change this to GP. Will that make a difference when I do that? No, I should be able to redo this and upload it to my Jet Budget, my Jet Hub and I would be submitting it and I’m not sure that that’s gonna work because I didn’t upload it. But I would see those changes come through in here. So that’s just a quick overview about the budget, we’re gonna be doing a lot more webinars. And certainly, you can go to our main website and you’ll see if you type in budget on the search, it’ll show you the webinar that we ran on the 13th to talk about this budget tool, and show it in action. I encourage you to see that.

Now, I wanted to show you some Jet Enterprise very quickly, so you can get an idea of what it looks like. In my Jet ribbon I can actually access Jet Enterprise through my Jet ribbon and it’s through pivot table. That’s where I can do it. Or I can actually use it in here by changing my data source to a data cube. And if I had the warehouse, I would do the warehouse. So, you know, I have my GP cube here, I have my AX cube, I have my NAV cube, I could be doing it any one of those ways. And when I’m in here and I look at my data, here’s my…if I’m looking at whether my tables that are available to me. Depending on the data source, you would see all sorts of information in here, but if you’re working with Jet Enterprise, all you see is the name of your data cubes where all your tables have been rolled together.

Now, let me show you quickly on a pivot table, what that would look like and we’re gonna come back in here very quickly. And I wanna write a pivot table and I’m gonna use my NAV cube and I’m gonna use it on, since it’s first up, I’m gonna do it on sales. When I do this, I can see all sorts of information. My first grouping, these are the epsilon, these are values, these are calculations we’ve already made just on sales orders. Perhaps I wanna look at my post sales transactions, things have actually happened not things that haven’t happened yet. And maybe I wanna see my sales and my profit percentage. And you can see it’s quickly showing up. Those are my values I wanted to see. How about if I wanted to see it by country, by customer, and I wanted to see what they were buying, I would hit into my item. And perhaps I wanna see it by year. Did I click on that? There it is.

So, there’s my customer, and I wanna see it over a number of years. We already have this preset to…I can pick it separately, year, quarter, month, or day. But we have a hierarchy already configured here. And I just wrote a very complex report in a few clicks. And here it is. And so, you can see and I’ll just turn off my field list here so you can see it. But look how big this report is and my customers and I can see this customer what they’ve been buying from us over the years. I could add quantity to it. All sorts of things I can do with it. And that’s what makes Jet Enterprise a great tool. All I said was I wanted to analyze sales and it’s given me a ton of information on my sales without me having to say, “Where’s the data in my ERP?”

Now, I’m over my time, so I’m gonna stop and I’m gonna see, Tess, is there any questions? Do we have any chat questions? Anybody have any questions? We’re gonna throw it open. What’s happening?

Tess: So, the only question that came in early in the presentation was, “Does Jet Reports work with Dynamics AX?”

Janice: Absolutely.

Tess: Yeah. I think you addressed that later on in your presentation.

Janice: Yes. You wanna look at our Jet Enterprise for sure.

Tess: And no other questions have come in yet, but if anyone has any questions, you can submit them into the question pane because we still have a few minutes left.

Janice: Any question at all. And while you’re doing that, I’m gonna just play around with this budget to see if I can get something else happening here. While you’re doing that, on my add to work item for expenses and I’ll enter the data myself because I’m the only one on here. As I play around, oh, look at that. Now, I can see my main accounts here, and maybe I just wanna do…I’ll just do a few just so you can see how it works. And I can split it up by segment one, I can add all the…maybe not this one. And I might add segment three as well. And you can see I’m building out a template and that’s what I want people to work on. And I say finish and I can say enter data in Excel or enter it online. I’ll do it online this time and there I see my segments and I only have this budget set for three months. I couldn’t make it more than that, but I could start entering my budgets in here and go from there.

So, I like the idea that I could do it in Excel, like I said, because I think sometimes it’s a lot easier…oopsy, to bring it down and let’s just put a few numbers in here so people can see what it’s doing. And I’m gonna say Save and Submit. Now, I’m the only one on here, so it automatically gets approved, but I can look at my overview and I can see my work is in there. And I can go in and I can change that if I wanted and get into my work items here, into my expenses, should be able to pull up preview data, this is the part where I’m was getting stuck before here because I wasn’t sure how I get back in here. Is it in my templates? No, because we didn’t make a template. Well, I’m not sure, but I will after this. I will be learning all about this and getting this happening. Anything else?

Tess: No, no other questions came through.

Janice: Okay. Well, we could say that the best thing to do is talk to your rep at Encore if you have any more questions. And at the Encore, I’ll be glad to help you and certainly I’ll be glad to help you. But I encourage you to go to Encore and ask away.

Tess: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Janice. And we’re happy you could join us today.

Janice: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Tess: Awesome. And I will be sending out a recording later today. So, have a good day everyone.

Janice: Thank you. Bye now.

Tess: Thank you.