Jet Reports + Fabric: Flexible Reporting and Comprehensive Analytics

If you’ve made the move to Microsoft Fabric, you know how handy it is to have all your data from various systems together in one data lake for integrated analytics. But is it easy to get the financial reports you need from all that data? Or is your Microsoft Fabric reporting process still slowing you down? If so, consider pairing Jet Reports from insightsoftware with Fabric to get comprehensive data access and customized reporting on the fly.

By using Fabric without Jet Reports, you may be struggling with the time and money required to get all the reporting functions you need. If you’re not a technical genius, you’re waiting around for IT to give you a custom report in Power BI. Or maybe you’re still manually exporting from Fabric and importing into Excel. Frustrating!

If time-consuming reporting processes have you gritting your teeth, you’ll want to hear how Jet Reports can help with its live Fabric connection. Here are some benefits you’ll find when you combine the flexibility of Jet Reports with Fabric’s enterprise analytics platform:

• A live connection to the Fabric platform and its data lake

• Self-service report building in Jet Reports

• Fast access to cohesive, accurate data in Excel

• Adaptable reports for changing business needs

Now that Jet Reports enables live connections to Fabric, your finance team can use Jet Reports' real-time Excel-based reporting along with Power BI dashboards without calling on IT. With this functionality, you can reduce IT bottlenecks. The flexibility allows accountants and analysts to create reports independently, pulling directly from Fabric's data lake.

Live Fabric Connection From Jet Reports

Let’s look at an example shared by Chris Weaver, insightsoftware Director of Product Management. “With Jet, customers do not have to choose between Power BI dashboards with Fabric, and easily getting their data in Excel. They can have both. This is especially powerful for large data sets. What if you need your Fabric data in a huge spreadsheet for importing into Excel?” Exporting 1 million rows every time you run a report is a pain, Weaver noted. Going further, he asked, “What if you have a spreadsheet with 2 million rows? Well, you’re out of luck because you can only put 1 million rows in a spreadsheet. With Jet, not only can you get that data into Excel, but you can also summarize and slice the data in Excel so you can filter on the fly and get exactly what you need.”

With the powerhouse combo of Jet Reports and Fabric, your finance teams can still get their data quickly and easily into Excel. Unlike many of our competitors, Jet Reports has a live Fabric connection. So if a Jet Reports customer wants to use our reporting tool alongside the full Microsoft stack, including Fabric and its Real-Time Intelligence, they can.

Self-Service Report Building

Finance needs access to the data in Excel as well as Power BI. If you’re using Fabric alone without Jet Reports, your developers might have to write SQL queries to send the data to Excel for custom reports, often missing data needed for that new ad hoc analysis. Or you might be manually downloading data from Power BI for manipulation in Excel every time management has a new question or you do an accounting close. That’s not the best use of your time.

With the flexible report wizard in Jet Reports, accounting teams can create self-serve reports without waiting in the queue for IT developers’ time. When you’re building your custom report, you can use familiar Excel formulas for the functions you need as you manipulate the data. Drag-and-drop features let you quickly rearrange elements, add new data fields, or adjust formatting for that particular report, such as all the reports needed for an accounting cycle close.

“If you implement Jet Reports, the amount of labor and stress shrinks,” Weaver said. “For example, a company using Jet Reports could shorten it’s time to accounting cycle close from two weeks to two days, or even a day. I’ve seen it over and over again.”

Reporting With Accurate Data

But let's go back to our scenario of using Fabric data exported into Excel without Jet Reports. What happens if you're working with a huge spreadsheet in Excel and you notice several data points that aren't up to date? Since you've downloaded a static snapshot of the data, any new transactions—like journal entries posted after your download—won't appear in your Excel file. You'd need to re-download the entire dataset and manually update your spreadsheet to see current information, leading to increased time required and most importantly increasing the likelihood of making an error.Using Jet Reports, the live connection to Microsoft Fabric with automatic updates ensures you're always working with the most current, accurate data.

Adapting Reports as Business Needs Evolve

Finance professionals know that your business reporting extends way beyond your functional area of responsibility. One of the advantages of Fabric is the ability to run finance reports with comprehensive data from across your business. But let’s face it: the reports you create are never one and done.

Even when IT develops a custom data set for Power BI that meets your current needs, the requirements change, your business morphs, and leadership wants to analyze the data in a new way.

Agility is key for financial professionals these days. You can combine the sophisticated data management of Fabric with the familiarity of Excel-based reporting in Jet Reports, customized to your changing business needs. Then you can dip into that beautiful lake of data in different ways to match new moves your business is making. Jet Reports also incorporates Lineos AI to help you uncover meaningful insights and data-driven decisions with AI assistance.

Optimizing your reporting to support business intelligence is vital to continued success. That means up-to-date data, comprehensive real-time reporting, and forward-looking analysis for strategic decision making.

Ensure your reporting stays adaptable, accurate, and speedy by exploring the capabilities of Jet Reports combined with Fabric.