I’m not questioning anyone’s judgement here but Business Intelligence (BI) is fast becoming the new CRM (aka the emprerors new clothes). Why? Because its seems many medium and large enterprises are falling over themselves to get some form of BI implemented without really understanding what it will and wont give them. Let me give you an example, the company I am currently consulting for have chosen to buy not one, but two BI solutions but then discovered that both of these solutions, whilst eventually delivering the needs of the business, out of the box neither solution can report on the one key area of data the business needs to report on.

The reason I raise this is because we have delivered virtually all of the management reporting requirements using sql reporting services, no BI cubes in sight! Of course one of the useful things as regards GL reporting is that the periodic balances are stored in the GL master table anyway so the aggregations are done, its then just a case of splitting out by cost centre and creating views to group the account codes by sales, cost of sales, balance sheet etc.