Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides 54 out of the box reports. These include reports for all the modules like sales, marketing and service as well as it includes monitoring report for example user summery.

Most of these reports can fulfill our business requirement but some time we need to write custom reports or need to modify existing reports. In this article we will help you to understand different reporting development options for Dynamics CRM.

Report Wizard
This is an out of the box tool which can be used to develop main (not sub) reports by following a wizard where we can select our primary and related entity as well, if required.

We can define filtering criteria and setup grouping depending on the requirement. It also allows us to set report format for example just tabular report or chart and tabular report but does not provide any option to define custom formatting of report data. Report wizard does not provide any flexibility to modify reports layouts or define custom layout options like – we can’t dynamically define report layout based on some logic using expressions, but it is a good option to develop an easy reports by just following couple of screens. Developing reports using report wizard does not require any technical knowledge.

Custom Reports using Visual Studio
If you want to develop a complex custom report or want to modify existing report for some complex changes, you need to use visual studio for this. We can use visual studio for developing reports for both CRM online and on premise. We can develop two type of reports in visual studio for CRM:
• FetchXML
• SSRS
CRM online only supports FetchXML reports, whereas we can use both type of reports for on premise. Visual studio provides you full flexibility in term of report layout, different formatting options, expressions and complex grouping.

To develop report using visual studio, you should have good experience in SSRS , FetchXML query.

Power BI
This is powerful platform to develop rich BI reports. It allows you to connect different data sources

and visualize data by creating rich analytics reports. We can use Power BI using three options Power BI for Desktop, Power BI service and Power BI apps for mobile. We can connect Power BI with CRM Online or on premise to get dynamics CRM data and render it over reports using different formats. Further we can use these reports in Dynamics CRM dashboards. Power BI can refresh it’s data to provide more realistic numbers. We can share these reports with other users as well.
In our next articles we will demonstrate how to use these option to write custom reports, so stay tuned !!

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