My wife is an awesome corporate finance professional.
The following is a true story at the breakfast table this morning. Keeping in mind that I was an engineer by training, I told her that some of the financial reporting tools in Acumatica are cool by my standard. She listened to me quietly and proceeded to recount complex financial models she built using MS Excel for multinational corporations for discounted cash flow analysis, leveraged buyout, and M&A. My head was blown…
The moral of the story is as good as ERP systems are for data collecting and processing, some amazing data analysis is done by those who wield the power of Excel.
How do you get data out of a cloud ERP system into Excel? Generic inquiries in Acumatica give you the ability to expose data by using the Open Data Protocol (OData). You can use Acumatica as the data source, and then use Excel (versions higher than 2007 or other third-party applications that support OData) to track and analyze the data.
Here are a few things you need to know:
1. You choose a Generic Inquiry (GI) as data source. Make sure you specify the inquiry conditions that will be used instead of parameter values.
2. You publish the GI by selecting the Make Visible on the UI check box and specify the site map title for the inquiry to expose through OData.
3. Based on the role assigned to you, you need to assign the Delete level of access to the exposed inquiry.
4. To test your access to and view the exposed GI results, in the address bar of your browser, you enter the URL of the OData endpoint of your Acumatica instance (e.g., https://yourcompany.acumatica.com/OData). When the system asks you to authenticate yourself, provide your sign-in credentials. When your identity has been confirmed, the system displays the list of available inquiries.
5. If your instance has multiple tenants, you add the login name of the tenant to the end of the URL (e.g., https://yourcompany.acumatica.com/OData/ACME Engineering).
6. To view the GI in Excel, open an Excel workbook. In the Data ribbon tab, click Get Data > From Other Sources > From OData Feed.
7. In the OData Feed wizard, select the Basic option button, enter the URL of the OData endpoint, and click OK. In the next step, switch to the Basic tab, enter your sign-in credentials, and click OK.
8. In the Navigator dialog box, choose the Gi from the left pane and view the data in the right pane. When you click Load, Excel downloads the data from your Acumatica instance.
I hope it helps. Give us a call if you have any questions.
Eric.