Financials and Business Intelligence

Abel BI Reporting

Abel BI is a business intelligence reporting solution built on Microsoft® Power BI®, designed to provide clear visibility of operational and financial performance using data from your Abel ERP system. It enables businesses that use Abel ERP to turn ERP data into actionable insight through interactive dashboards, role-based reporting and transaction-level analysis.

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Advanced Financials for Global Businesses

Understanding business performance with Business Intelligence Reporting

Clear, timely reporting is essential for managing operational performance, financial outcomes, and day-to-day decision-making. As businesses grow, reporting requirements often become more complex, making it harder to maintain a consistent and reliable view of performance across the organisation.

Abel BI provides a structured approach to business intelligence reporting, bringing together operational and financial data in a format that is easier to view, explore, and analyse across different roles within the organisation.

You may see this where:

Senior managers have limited visibility of how operational activity is impacting financial results
Department managers are working across multiple reports or spreadsheets to understand performance
Teams spend time reconciling figures from different sources
Reporting is static and difficult to explore or adapt as questions arise

This can make it harder to understand what is happening across the business and to respond effectively as conditions change.

As reporting requirements grow, organisations need more than access to data — they need confidence that information is accurate, connected and relevant to the decisions being made. Abel BI provides a framework for turning ERP transactions into meaningful business insight.

Supporting different roles and responsibilities

Abel BI is structured to support the different roles involved in managing and operating your business. Rather than presenting isolated dashboards, business intelligence reporting is organised in a way that allows senior management, departmental managers, and operational teams to work with information that is relevant to their responsibilities.

This structure enables people across the business to move from a high-level view of performance through to detailed operational data in a consistent and logical way.

Abel BI’s structure supports the different responsibilities across your business, linking high-level performance views to the detailed data needed for day-to-day analysis and investigation.

Abel BI is organised across four distinct levels:

Company-level dashboards providing senior management with an overall view of business performance across key financial and operational areas
Department dashboards supporting managers in areas such as sales, finance, inventory, and manufacturing to monitor performance within their teams
Process-level reporting giving operational managers and supervisors visibility into how workflows and activities are performing, including volumes, timings, and process measures
Detailed analysis reports enabling analysts and operational staff to review underlying transactions, apply filters, and carry out further investigation

Abel BI’s layered approach allows each role to work with reporting that is relevant to their responsibilities, while maintaining a clear connection between summary results and the underlying data.

This approach ensures leadership, managers and operational teams are working from the same information while focusing on measures that are relevant to their responsibilities.

Business Intelligence Reporting across the whole business

Abel BI provides business intelligence reporting across the full range of operational and financial areas within your business, allowing performance to be viewed in context rather than in isolation.

Because these reports are built on your Abel ERP data, they reflect how information flows through your business processes. This makes it easier to understand how activity in one area — such as sales, production, or purchasing — impacts other parts of the business.

Reports are available across key functional areas including:

Financial performance and control
Customers, sales, and margins
Suppliers and purchasing
Inventory, warehousing, and logistics
Manufacturing, jobbing, and scheduling
Demand planning and forecasting
Quality and compliance monitoring
Master data and supporting information

By bringing these areas together within a single business intelligence reporting environment, Abel BI supports a more consistent view of performance, helping teams work with the same information across departments and reducing the need to reconcile data from multiple sources.

Example: from Customer Order to Sales Reporting

In Abel BI, sales reporting is based on data from Customer Invoice documents, which are generated through the customer order and fulfilment process.

Customer demand is captured in Abel as a Customer Sales Order, entered directly or received electronically from external systems such as Shopify and other eCommerce platforms, or through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) solutions such as Acume and Lucy.

Fulfilment is then managed within Abel. Orders may be supplied from existing stock through warehouse picking, or produced through manufacturing processes before despatch. These operational steps — including picking, production, and shipment — are recorded as part of the transaction flow.

When the despatch is completed, Abel automatically generates the Customer Invoice, ensuring financial records are created directly from the underlying operational activity.

Business intelligence reporting is built on this invoice data. The Sales Performance Dashboard provides aggregated measures such as sales, margin, and quantities, with the ability to drill into individual customer invoices and transaction-level detail. This ensures reporting reflects the full process from order capture through to invoicing.

This creates a direct connection between customer demand, operational execution and financial performance, providing greater confidence in reported results.

From Summary to Detail — drill-down Business Intelligence Reporting

Abel BI enables people across the business to move from high-level dashboards into detailed operational data, providing a clear link between overall performance and the underlying transactions that drive results.

Senior management can review summary dashboards that show overall performance across key areas such as sales, inventory, and financial results. From there, department managers and operational teams can drill down through successive levels of detail to review the activity behind those figures, including individual orders, stock movements, or financial entries.

This approach enables teams to:

Explore performance in more detail without switching between multiple reports
Investigate variances or trends by working directly with the underlying data
Apply filters to focus on specific time periods, products, customers, or transactions
Export detailed data where further analysis is required

This layered approach enables users to move naturally from strategic reporting through to root-cause analysis without relying on separate reporting tools or manually assembled spreadsheets.

By connecting summary views to detailed data in this way, Abel BI supports a more complete understanding of how results are generated and makes it easier for managers and operational staff to investigate and respond to changes in performance.

Ready-to-use reports and flexible extension

Abel BI includes a suite of standard reports that are available for use as part of your business intelligence reporting environment. These reports are designed to provide immediate visibility of key business metrics across functional areas, without the need to build reports from scratch.

Abel BI complements Abel’s standard reporting by providing a more visual and flexible way to explore ERP reporting data through interactive dashboards, filters and drill-down analysis. Each report presents information through interactive visuals, with filters and chart options that allow teams to view different aspects of the same data. In many cases, a single BI report can provide the equivalent of multiple traditional reports, reducing the need to switch between separate reports or consolidate information manually.

This allows managers and operational teams to explore data in more flexible ways — adjusting views, focusing on specific areas, and working with consistent data within a single reporting environment.

Because the reporting framework is already aligned to Abel ERP processes and data structures, businesses can gain value more quickly than with traditional custom-built BI projects while retaining flexibility for future reporting requirements.

Alongside these standard reports, Abel BI also provides access to structured data through tables and views that can be used to develop additional reports where required. This enables your business to extend reporting over time while continuing to work from a consistent data set.

By combining ready-to-use reports with the ability to extend reporting as needed, Abel BI supports both immediate use and ongoing refinement as reporting requirements change.

Working with Abel’s data in Microsoft Power BI®

Abel BI is delivered through Microsoft® Power BI®, providing a modern and familiar environment for working with business intelligence data. Reports are presented through visual dashboards and charts that can be adjusted through simple interaction, allowing teams to explore information without needing to run multiple reports. This provides a business intelligence reporting environment where operational and financial data can be analysed through dashboards, reports and transaction-level detail.

Senior management can review high-level dashboards to monitor performance across key areas, while department managers can work with the same reports to focus on specific time periods, products, customers, or operational measures. Operational teams and analysts can apply filters, change views, and move more quickly between different perspectives on the data as questions arise.

Reports can be accessed through desktop environments using Power BI, and are also available via the Power BI mobile app. This enables managers and team members to review relevant business information whether they are in the office or working remotely.

Organisations can also take advantage of Microsoft’s continuing investment in analytics, self-service reporting, mobile reporting and AI-enabled capabilities through the Power BI platform.

By using Microsoft Power BI as the reporting platform, Abel BI provides a flexible and widely supported interface for working with structured business intelligence and reporting data across different roles within the organisation.

Built on your Abel data

Abel BI is built directly on data from your Abel ERP system, providing business intelligence reporting that reflects how your business processes operate in practice. This ensures that reports are aligned with the structure of your data, your documents, and the way information flows through your system.

Reports are structured around the way Abel manages operational and financial processes, helping users understand performance, investigate results, and work with consistent data across departments.

Reporting in Abel BI follows the same functional areas and processes used within Abel, making it easier for teams to understand how data is organised and how results are derived. This alignment supports a more consistent approach to reporting across departments and reduces the need to interpret or reconcile information from multiple sources.

Unlike generic BI projects that require extensive modelling and interpretation, Abel BI is designed around Abel’s established ERP processes and data relationships. This helps ensure reporting remains consistent, meaningful and easier to maintain over time. By combining ERP-aligned data models, proven reporting structures and Microsoft Power BI technology, Abel BI helps organisations make decisions using consistent, connected data derived directly from their Abel ERP transactions and processes.

Data used in Abel BI is prepared specifically for reporting, allowing information to be viewed consistently across dashboards and reports. This supports reliable analysis while maintaining a clear link between summary views and the underlying transactions.

By building reporting directly on your Abel ERP data, Abel BI provides a practical and scalable foundation for business intelligence. The combination of ERP-aligned reporting models, Microsoft Power BI technology and transaction-level visibility enables organisations to improve performance visibility, strengthen decision-making and support long-term growth with greater confidence.

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Advanced Financials for Global Businesses