Cosmos is a cloud reporting and analytics solution built specifically for Business Central, offering clients the ability to reduce costs, save time, improve productivity and eliminate business risk when reporting and analysing SaaS data.
Built to help Business Central users make data-driven decisions, Cosmos eliminates reporting bottlenecks and performance issues making it easier to create a report or Power BI dashboard using optimised Business Central data.
Leveraging the familiar Microsoft Excel environment to quickly and easily build, customise and share meaningful reports, Cosmos is built specifically with users in mind and requires no data modelling or technical expertise.
In this 30-minute webinar, host Rob Jackson takes us through the benefits of Cosmos, including:
- Lightning-fast reporting - Run reports simultaneously, faster than ever without locking users from Excel or other business applications.
- 100% cloud – Access your data anytime, anywhere on any device including Mac users.
- Easy to use – Made for business users, not technical experts. Users can easily build and run reports thanks to the pre-built data model for Business Central – Plus instant value with 30 pre-built, out of the box ready-to-go reports.
- Power BI, 2-way integration – Access the Cosmos data model within Power BI to easily build critical business dashboards offering 1-source of the truth across the organisation.
Transcript
0:03
Welcome to today’s webinar that we are doing in conjunction with Cosmos.
0:08
Rob is in control of the slides, so he’ll be advancing them for me.
0:11
My name is Danusia Jolliffe, and I’m the Marketing and Customer Services Director here at TVision Technology.
0:18
I’ll just do the housekeeping to begin with.
0:20
If you have any questions, please do use that question box and we can answer as we’re going along.
0:25
There’ll also be an FAQ question and answer session at the end of the deck also. And we also have Rob on the call.
0:34
Rob, if you’d like a quick introduction, please. Hi, Danusia. Yeah, good to see you.
0:39
And really pleased to see so many people on the call today. And yeah, can’t wait to show Cosmos.
0:44
So, I’ve just brought up the agenda.
0:46
I don’t know if you want to speak through that quickly, and then I’ll get started. Brilliant.
0:50
So, first of all, Rob, we’ll just introduce Cosmos to you, talk about a portal, the report editor, very important power BI integration that everyone wants to know about, a little bit about the solution overview, and then that final Q&A piece.
1:03
So, there will be the live demo, and as I said, if you do have any questions, please do ask in the question box, and I will ask Rob at appropriate time, or we can keep them to the end, or take them offline if you’d like some more information.
1:14
The webinar will be available on demand in a few days, and if you do have any more questions at any point, contact me or Rob and we can help you.
1:22
Rob, over to you.
1:24
Brilliant, thank you very much.
1:26
So, Cosmos is a purpose-built reporting and analytic solution for Business Central in the cloud.
1:33
We have basically designed a product that really sits right side beside Business Central.
1:40
It sits on the Azure platform and all of the report execution is carried out on that platform also.
1:46
So that really is what gives Cosmos its lightning-fast speed so we can process Excel reports 48 times faster than traditional Excel desktop solutions.
1:56
One of the biggest pain points, I think, for users is that when they run reports, it slows down their local machine, and that’s something that Cosmos completely eliminates.
2:07
So, I’ll just run quickly through the product components of Cosmos.
2:12
Everything that users interact with is via the Cosmos portal.
2:17
This is delivered via a web browser, so very similar if you like to Business Central.
2:24
You’re logging in with your Microsoft credentials, exactly the same accounts you’re using for Business Central, and you would use the Cosmos portal for administering users, for building reports, editing existing reports, for scheduling, for archiving, and also we give access through this to the Power BI dashboard, which we’ll show.
2:45
One of the most important things is being able to build your report exactly the way that you want without requiring any technical skills, without having to understand the underlying data model of Business Central.
2:59
Business Central is quite a complex data structure, so we basically make that easier.
3:03
We’re taking the raw data out of Business Central, we are building a data model with relationships already built between the tables.
3:14
And that just makes the whole process of building report content out easier for business users.
3:22
And as well, of course, as Danusia mentioned, Power BI is a really, really big topic.
3:27
Lots of people want to get started with Power BI.
3:30
It’s really kind of a game of two halves.
3:34
To be able to first get something out of Power BI, you’ve got to have your data again in the right structure.
3:40
And that is, again, quite an effort.
3:43
Sometimes you’re dealing, again, with the raw tables from Business Central.
3:49
But the good news is that we make that whole process, again, much easier.
3:52
So, you can integrate Power BI, connect straight into the data model that we’ve already provided from Cosmos, and then you just get to do the fun part, which is building the visualisation.
4:03
So, we’ll show that again on today’s session.
4:07
So as kind of promised, I don’t like PowerPoint too much.
4:11
So, we can just jump straight into the actual product and just take a look around.
4:17
So, I’m just here in a fresh web browser session and every customer after we’ve done the onboarding logs into the portal URL.
4:28
So that’s something that you can just bookmark and when I authenticate, it’s just logging me in with my normal Microsoft credentials.
4:36
Everything’s integrated…
4:39
Er Rob? Rob, we’ve already had our first question.
4:41
Does this work on Macs as well?
4:43
Absolutely, because everything I’m showing you is in the browser.
4:48
So, we’re completely platform independent, whether you’re using a Windows machine, a Mac, and that applies also to the report design.
4:56
So, we can do report design in the desktop version or the online version of Excel.
5:02
Makes no difference. But everything, pretty much, that I’ll show you today, I’m not basically going to leave the browser, so you can be on any operating system at all, but yeah, good question.
5:13
Thank you.
5:15
All right, so the first place that I’ve landed here is the administration page.
5:19
It’s just important to kind of show the integration that we’ve got with the Azure tenant that this is connected to.
5:24
So, if I want to add a user, the process is really, really dead simple.
5:28
I can just add a user into the system here, and in this case, I’m adding a light user, and then we can just manage the permission roles within the system.
5:39
We have two main user types. Full users are people that can actually design reports.
5:44
They can do basically anything within Cosmos from changing the actual data model as well, and the light user can take reports that have already been written, and they can run and execute them.
5:56
Service users at the bottom, is just for ourselves and partners to help support you.
6:02
But typically, when you were to log into the system, you would come to the reports area. This is where all of the Excel reports live. And as a full user, I have a workspace.
6:12
So, at the top here, these are reports that I’m building or editing at the moment.
6:17
And once reports are ready to be consumed by somebody else, then they can be checked into the reports area underneath with this check-in button.
6:27
So, I can build reports either from scratch or Cosmos comes with a comprehensive gallery of pre-built report content.
6:35
This covers several different functional areas such as finance, AP, AR, sales, purchasing, and inventory.
6:43
And this suite of reports reflects all of those business areas.
6:47
So, what I’ll do is just take a pre-built report, import that into the report section, and then it’s ready to run.
6:55
Our onboarding process takes only 30 minutes from start to finish.
6:59
And after that, customers have a data model that reflects all of those different areas, plus all of these reports that you can just get along and work with pretty much straight away.
7:12
Security in the system is really important, of course.
7:15
The user that I added at the beginning, if I want to expose this report definition to a particular user, I can do that and then press save.
7:24
And now if my fictitious user, Alice, was to log into the system, this would pretty much be her view where she can access now this report template and then run this on demand.
7:36
So, to do that, I can just press the play icon.
7:39
Most reports have got some kind of request page where I can put a starting and an ending date.
7:44
I can choose whether or not I want to run the report with the drill down function.
7:50
Then I can just press run.
7:52
At the same time, Cosmos runs reports concurrently, so I can run, for instance, another more meater report pack here, which is actually several reports that are built into the same Excel workbook.
8:10
And while the reports are processing, you can see the activities, and then I can just open up the result of the report.
8:17
And by default, this opens up again in Excel online.
8:23
So this report is structured as follows, we’ve got different sections that are being repeated down the page dynamically, so these are the account categories, and then inside each section is listed all of the general ledger accounts that belong to each category, and in the other direction we’ve got the global dimension codes, in this case being built out in columns, and the intersect between, in this case, electronics and account number 44200.
8:52
This is the aggregate that shows me the total of all of the transactions that sit beneath the report.
9:00
Just opening up the Cosmos Excel add-in on the right-hand side here, really good for IT administrators.
9:06
This is actually pushed out automatically to every single client or person within the organisation via the Microsoft admin centre.
9:14
What we’re actually seeing here is like a mini website.
9:17
So, we can actually update the content.
9:19
There’s no need to revisit machines to update versions of the add-in.
9:23
We handle that automatically through the system.
9:26
Likewise, any new features get pushed out automatically.
9:30
So, when I’m looking at the Excel add-in, having run a report, I can see here some context about the number that I’m clicked on.
9:37
So here I can see that this is a sum.
9:40
It is based off of the general ledger transactions table, and I’m summing up the amount field.
9:44
I’ve applied this reverse sign operator so that all of my revenue numbers appear positive, and then it just gives me some context about where I am selected on the report.
9:55
So, for line 44200 electronics and the amount is filtered by that date range.
10:02
I’ve got the opportunity also to look at all of the transactions beneath that.
10:06
So, if I see some kind of odd number here or I want to investigate that further.
10:11
Either a full or a light user can use the drill down function.
10:15
This is just going to run a separate tab for me.
10:18
And this shows me every single transaction at line level that builds up that aggregate.
10:23
Now a really important thing about Cosmos is that we can link into a Business Central environment or even multiple business central environments and pull data from multiple companies.
10:35
If you look in column E, the aggregate that I’m working with there is actually data that is coming from two different companies that is within the Cosmos data model.
10:44
So, the Cosmos data model can be just one company, but also it can store data from multiple companies as well.
10:51
Really useful because Business Central out of the box can only really report one company at a time.
10:58
You’ve got the flexibility within the report design to, you can have a report that lays out the companies by columns or by sheets.
11:08
You don’t have to have the numbers combined like that.
11:11
And I can actually show you an example of a report that uses that design.
11:18
So, this report here, balance sheet by company, is one that if we just look at this in the design mode, and at the same time, actually, what I’ll do is run that report.
11:28
So, I’ve got the balance sheet for a company here, and then we can just compare the two side by side.
11:35
If I just go here to the report design to start with, and then just open up the task pane again, I get a different view.
11:43
So, as a report editor, I get all of these tools that are used to build up the actual report content.
11:51
Built into the product as well is actually an AI chatbot, and we’ve got a library of over 300 articles online with walkthrough videos and that type of thing.
12:02
So, I can put here, for example, how do I add filters?
12:07
And this should go off, look at our knowledge base and come back with a suggested article about the question that I’ve asked.
12:14
And I can quickly jump to that.
12:16
Most of the support articles have got a short video for a particular topic and a walkthrough of the process.
12:22
So, it’s very, very easy for end users to access this content either via the portal or by the AI tool that we’ve got built into the product.
12:35
When we’re building report content, if I just go to create something new, the tables that you see here are coming from the Cosmos data model. This is not the raw tables from Business Central.
12:47
For example, the sales transactions table that you see here, there are I think in total 15 different business central tables that contribute towards that.
12:57
So, we are combining invoice, credit memo, data, we are pulling in all of the correct value entry transactions from the items.
13:06
So, when you’re working with the data model, it’s much easier for business users to understand the structure of the data.
13:16
I’ll just show you a couple of the tools. These are the functions within the actual product.
13:22
And these range lists basically repeat down the sections of the report for every record.
13:30
So, if I just select this one here for general ledger account, this is the area of the report that gets repeated down the page for every general ledger account number that belongs to the category.
13:40
And then in this direction, this is a function that is building out the columns.
13:46
So, what you can do, as I just mentioned, is that you’re going to have a couple of tabs open at the same time.
13:51
So, this is the output of the report, and this is the design template.
13:55
So, it’s very, very easy to work side by side.
14:00
Some organisations as well, like the default report content is generally one report per Excel worksheet.
14:09
What I’ve done here is kind of mocked up something that might represent a month end process for an organisation.
14:17
So, I’ve got lots of different reports, but within the same Excel workbook.
14:22
So, I’ve got an income statement for just one individual month.
14:26
This one is my year-to-date position.
14:29
This one is year to date, but I’ve split this time the columns out by months.
14:34
And then this one is the same data but splitting out the columns by dimension code.
14:40
And then finally, I can combine this with some operational report where we are showing sales of item category by salesperson for a particular period.
14:52
So, Cosmos doesn’t really mind what the data is.
14:54
You can build out worksheet, row, column content, dynamically within the reports as required.
15:03
So, it’s completely down to an organisation as to how you want to structure and lay out your reports.
15:11
Just a piece on what happens when we’ve actually built the report.
15:15
Well, quite often users want to set a schedule and actually distribute.
15:21
So, we can set a time for the report to run either weekly or monthly.
15:27
So, we could just pick odd days of the month like this if we want to.
15:30
We can set report options.
15:32
And something important to note that the recipient of the report can be, I can pick existing users here, but it could be any valid email address.
15:40
And the recipient of a Cosmos scheduled output It doesn’t even need to be a licensed user within Cosmos.
15:48
And it’s also important to note that you don’t need to be a Business Central user to be a Cosmos user either.
15:54
So, it’s a good opportunity to look at the licensing requirements for your organisation.
16:02
We have integration also to SharePoint.
16:04
So if I was just to look here at a recent report run, which is the first report that I did, I can choose if I want to just take a snapshot of this report and I can just put some message here, I’ll just make something up but you might want to put something more meaningful in here and then when we press archive what is actually happening is that snapshot of the report is being transferred, it gets stored in a SharePoint repository in the background and then that can be accessed at any point in time so that’s quite a useful feature particularly for finance teams at the at the month end or that type of thing.
16:41
Rob? Yes.
16:45
I’m sorry I just had to put myself on mute there was a bit of noise here in the office.
16:48
We’ve had a question saying can you compare historical data and bring that in from other sources as well and how complicated is that? As well as, does Cosmos know anything about custom tables and fields and bringing that in?
17:02
Yeah, absolutely so the answer is yes to both of those, and I can and I can show you this.
17:09
So basically, we are making connection to Business Central via an app which is a connector of ours.
17:15
So, you can search for Cosmos on the Microsoft App Store and when you install that it gives us access and we can choose the multiple companies that we want to pull data from, from your Business Central environment.
17:28
We can actually add multiple environments that I’ve got here.
17:31
So, I’ve got yet another one here with a different company so we can combine data.
17:36
It could be that organisations are running different regional versions of Business Central globally, but they want to pull all their data into one place, so we’re doing that for a few customers.
17:47
Now, at the same time, when we set up data sources, you can have data coming from Business Central, but it could come from Excel, it could come from like an Azure SQL database, so we’ve got connectors to be able to integrate other data sources.
18:01
So, if you have got legacy data that is coming from an older ERP system, we can pull that into Cosmos as a static data set, map that into the data model, and then we just join on the more recent transactions from Business Central.
18:16
So, if customers are migrating from an older Nav On-Prem system to Business Central, but you’re starting again, but you don’t want to lose your historical data, then that’s certainly something that we can house within Cosmos.
18:31
And also, I’ve just literally come off the phone to a company, they’ve got 12 Business Central companies within the same environment, but they budget outside of the system.
18:41
So, they’re looking at an Excel connector to basically pull in all of their budget information and join that onto Business Central data to allow them to report by both.
18:53
So, we’re doing quite a few things like transformations to the data.
18:59
One that’s pretty popular, is including additional dimension codes.
19:04
So, the general ledger entries table within Business Central carries the first two global dimension values.
19:11
All of the information is there inside Business Central about the other dimensions, but this is an example of me creating a column that doesn’t exist directly on this table but populating it by making a lookup to go and get the dimension value for a third dimension. In this case, it’s the area dimension.
19:28
So, we can kind of expand and do lots of other kind of work to enhance the data model.
19:36
But in the end, we’re taking data from Business Central and then it’s raw state. We’re kind of merging lots of tables together.
19:44
You can see an example here under the sales transactions table that I mentioned to you.
19:49
This is actually being fed by lots of different Business Central tables that, again, is quite difficult for business users to understand, and then we are then putting in place the relationships between this and the other tables, and that’s what makes the report design process really intuitive and easy for business users.
20:10
Now, of course, we’ve put a lot of effort into making this multi-company data model, everything structured in a way that’s easy to understand.
20:18
How else could we use this? And that’s really where Power BI comes into the picture.
20:22
So, Cosmos itself has an API, and we can connect to that API directly with Power BI.
20:30
I’m just going to drag across here Power BI Desktop. I’ll just make this larger.
20:35
I’m just in the table view here.
20:37
Instead of pointing Power BI directly at Business Central, again, you’ve got the challenge of having to make the actual data model, build everything up, again, from scratch.
20:48
What we’re able to do is point Power BI directly at Cosmos.
20:52
This sales transactions table is exactly that same table that we’ve already done the work to.
20:56
So, we’ve merged already the credit memos, the invoices, the cost entries, and everything is there together.
21:03
And you can download freely from our website some model templates that represent a structure just like the one here that I’m showing you.
21:11
So, this is a classic star schema where you have all of your transactions in the centre of the data model and all of your dimension tables on the outside.
21:20
And this allows you to really easily build out content like this that we can interact with.
21:26
So, if I want to dynamically set filters here just to show the results for one specific company, for one specific salesperson, for one specific year, let’s say for last year, then I can see the results pretty much immediately.
21:42
So how is it to build content out with this?
21:45
So, I can come here and just make a few visuals.
21:49
And when you’ve got the data modelled correctly in Power BI, the process is really dead simple.
21:56
So, because I’ve got the relationships already built between the tables, I can build out different visualisations, splitting my sales in this case, either by item category, or I might want to do that by salesperson code.
22:12
I might want to have a graph where I’m showing my sales.
22:17
Let’s say I want a line for my profit, but I want to describe this by quarters, that type of thing.
22:23
Or indeed, I might want a map where I’ve got my sales and I want to express that by the state or something like this.
22:34
And then all of these are automatically joined up together and I can just select either a salesperson code, a product category, or even two of those, whatever, and I can just, and all of these are kind of linked up together automatically.
22:48
So, it’s very, very easy to build out the content.
22:51
This one, of course, I’ve put a bit more effort into in terms of the styling and that type of thing, but the principle is exactly the same.
22:58
And in the end, you can publish this up to the Power BI service and our two-way integration is basically achieved through this.
23:06
So, via the Cosmos portal, under the reporting section, we can access the Excel reports here, but also this allows us to access quickly content that has been published to the Power BI service.
23:17
So, what this is showing me is all of my workspaces, dashboards that are published on the Power BI service, and I can access that published dashboard directly through the Cosmos portal without leaving the URL.
23:31
So, it kind of serves as a single point of reference for either Excel structured reports or interactive Power BI dashboards.
23:40
But really important to note, these are all based off of the same set of data.
23:43
So, the numbers in your reports will kind of tie up regardless of the presentation layer.
23:48
So, we’re just using Excel and Power BI as our presentation layers, really powered by the data model that Cosmos has set up through its integration to Business Central.
24:00
And just a note as well, Danusia, one last thing you mentioned about custom tables and fields, so we can connect to any custom table and field that is inside the database, whether it’s something that you’ve built for your customer or whether it’s something that the customer has integrated to Business Central from an app from AppSource.
24:20
Good example of that, we’re working with Benchmark at the moment, a drinks company.
24:24
They are using the Bevica add-in and we’re able to bring all of the specific tables and fields from Bevica into the Cosmos data model.
24:34
I’m going to pause now.
24:37
Well, actually, what I’ll do is just very quickly summarise why Cosmos.
24:42
Number one, lightning-fast reporting without tying up the Excel instance that you’ve got on your local laptop.
24:49
We’re processing reports on the Azure platform as opposed to using your local resources.
24:57
Everything is cloud hosted, there’s no service to maintain.
25:00
We push our updates to the product and new features.
25:03
Automatically, you can see the new feature releases on our website that come out every few weeks.
25:08
we can implement the solution really fast in 30 minutes or indeed sometimes slightly less.
25:16
And of course, we’ve got that two-way integration with Power BI.
25:19
So, as well as being able to build structured reports, it’s a solution for customers that want to get started with Power BI without having the complexity of dealing with the raw data.
25:29
So, I’m going to stop now, Danusia, to see whether we have any more questions that have come in.
25:35
Yeah, someone asked, where is all of the data stored?
25:39
Apologies if you already said that and I didn’t hear you.
25:42
No, that’s fine.
25:43
It’s an important question because obviously customers want to make sure that their information is secure.
25:47
And we basically have the data in a separate database that is hosted by ourselves.
25:54
There is no direct access to that database.
25:57
You have to come via the application or via the API into Cosmos.
26:01
Very similar to Business Central in that sense.
26:04
You don’t get direct access to the database behind Business Central.
26:08
So, data is secured in a customer-specific repository in exactly the same way as Business Central, more or less.
26:16
And another question was, how often does Cosmos do updates and what does the roadmap look like?
26:23
Yeah, you can refresh data.
26:25
I mean, we automatically refresh data every day, overnight, but then for organisations that are running their month end process where they’re posting journals and you want to just update the data, then there’s a button within the Cosmos portal to run the pipeline.
26:43
That does not do like a full reload, all we do is incrementally reload the transactions that have been added to Business Central since.
26:50
So, a typical example of that is if a customer is running like a single company or even two companies within a Business Central environment, typically that is completed like within a minute or something like that.
27:03
So very, very quick to get your data completely up to date within the data model, and then you can just trigger the process to run a report pack that might be like the one that I’ve shown you.
27:15
Okay, another question we’ve had is around training.
27:18
What does a training look like?
27:19
You said it’s quite quick to obviously get up and running, but is there anything extra that people can get shown, or how does that work?
27:26
Yeah, I think it’s really important to know that all of the content is accessible directly via the Cosmos portal as well.
27:34
So you can just come here and if you want to go to training videos, and this is completely open-gated, so you’re welcome after the webinar to share this out to people, but there’s quick start guides, but there’s training from all aspects of the system, whether it’s making enhancements to the data model or just actual report building, which is really what most end customers want to get started doing.
27:55
There are videos, walkthroughs of the process.
27:58
So, I would definitely encourage people that are looking at Cosmos to go and have a look at some of the content online because all of this is open-gated, it’s free of charge and it’s a really valuable asset, so.
28:12
Next, got a few more questions coming in actually saying around, is there a minimum license order?
28:18
And also, where can people find the costs?
28:21
Are they on the Cosmos website or is that a conversation with Thakshi and yourselves?
28:25
How does that work in terms of cost?
28:27
Yeah, so when you buy Cosmos, you basically buy a base package that includes one Business Central Environment Connector.
28:36
So, you can pull as many companies as you’ve got in that Business Central Environment.
28:41
You get one full user and the actual platform itself.
28:44
And then on top of that, you can just add additional full users or light users, depending on what your requirements are.
28:50
Things like the Excel Connector, the Power BI Connector are optional add-ons.
28:54
you can choose to run the software with and without that.
28:58
But yeah, for pricing, I think that’s something that should come specifically directly from yourself.
29:04
So, I would say that, you know, if people get in contact with Thakshi or whoever else afterwards, then we’d certainly get details provided on that via yourselves.
29:19
I think that’s all we’ve got for the moment.
29:21
Did anybody else have any more questions if you want to pop them in the question box before we finish up for today?
29:30
Okay, sounds good.
29:31
I mean, we’re able to take any other questions offline as well, Danusia, so definitely encourage people.
29:38
If you’ve got any more questions about the solution, please email the TVision team.
29:44
I’ll just put the details just on the screen here, so there’s an email address where you can just contact for any further questions, and we’d be pleased to help.
29:54
Great, okay, I think that’s all the questions now.
29:56
So, as always, thanks for time Rob, much appreciated.
29:59
Hope people have got a great overview there for Cosmos and how that could work for their business.
30:04
As I said at the beginning, this video recording will be available on demand soon and I know that Thakshi will definitely be in touch with people after this session, those who registered and attended and those who are unable to. So once again, thank you so much to Rob.
30:20
Yeah, and thanks for inviting us, really appreciated, thank you. Thanks everybody.
30:25
Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye.
