Occasionally, we receive emails from concerned clients who have heard about FRx being phased out—and there is some concern about the need to migrate to Management Reporter (MR). It sounds like MR is completely different than FRx, but many of the core concepts, e.g., rows, columns, trees, are nearly identical.

Let’s start with some basic questions/concerns:

• Do I lose all of my reports in FRx?
  Fortunately, no! There is a migration concept, although there are some items that don’t migrate because they have to be configured directly in MR, e.g., company settings, security.
• Can MR handle multicurrency/currency translation?
  Yes! And it is nicely integrated to the Dynamics GP multicurrency module.
• Can I report on my Forecaster data?
  Yes! Use the Forecaster Budget Import tool (available with your Forecaster licensing) to import your budget to GP, and then pull it to MR. Many users employ this process and already may be using it to report on Forecaster data in FRx.
• Can I drill down, use trees and export to Excel with analytical accounting?
  Yes! Many of the same capabilities exist in MR and FRx. If you have specific concerns, you can email gpsupport@bkd.com to discuss.

Of course, there are numerous blog posts about Management Reporter functionality. So we’ll just share some screenshots for those who are skeptical to illustrate how similar the core MR concepts are to FRx.

First, let’s start with rows.  Here is a sample row in MR:

A lot of similiarity, right? Row Code, Description, Format Code and Related Formulas/Rows/Units. One change you may notice to the far right is the Link to GL is replaced with the Link to Financial Dimensions—same concept, only more generic. So in that column, it identifies the segment before the value, e.g., Account.

What about columns? Here is a sample column in MR:

Same header lines and same concepts of Column Type, Book Code, Fiscal Year and Period. The column type to pull from the GL has changed to FD, for Amount from Financial Dimensions. When you select FD, the book code, fiscal year and period columns default similarly to FRx. And the concept of BASE (the period the report is being generated for) has not changed. Periods Covered changes the terms but not the meaning. PERIODIC is the old CUR (reporting on Current Period activity), while YTD has stayed the same.

What about Trees? Well, here you go:

Not much to see here; it is very similar to FRx. I should note the lack of email addresses, as this is something MR does not do at this time (although it is slated for future enhancement).

Last but not least are Report Definitions, which have replaced Report Catalogs.

These are a little different in appearance, but they include similar concepts, such as the detail level, building blocks, based period, base year and default base period.

We hope this will provide a bit more comfort for you. The leap to Management Reporter does not need to be painful.

For more information on migrating from FRx to Management Reporter, please contact our Microsoft Dynamics GP support center at gpsupport@bkd.com.