Your ERP is the single source of truth for your business. Every transaction, every customer, every order—it's all in there. Years of operational data, meticulously recorded.
So why does getting a simple report feel like pulling teeth?
You need to see sales by customer by product category for the last 12 months. The data exists. You know it exists. But the built-in reports don't show it that way. The saved searches are incomprehensible. And the last person who knew how to build custom reports left two years ago.
Welcome to ERP reporting.
The ERP Reporting Problem Nobody Warns You About
When you bought your ERP—whether that's NetSuite, MYOB Advanced, Cin7, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics—the sales demo showed beautiful dashboards. Real-time insights. Data at your fingertips.
What they didn't show you: those dashboards only work for the exact reports someone pre-built. The moment you need something different, you're on your own.
Here's what actually happens:
The report you need doesn't exist. You want to see gross margin by sales rep by product line. The system tracks all of this. But there's no report that combines it the way you need.
Building custom reports requires a PhD. NetSuite's saved searches. MYOB's report writer. SAP's query tools. They're powerful, technically. They're also incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a certified consultant billing $200/hour.
Exports come out mangled. You give up on the built-in tools and export to Excel. The data arrives with columns in the wrong place, empty cells where there should be values, and formatting that breaks your formulas. You spend an hour cleaning it up before you can even start analysing.
Real-time isn't real-time. You need current data for a meeting in 30 minutes. But the report takes 10 minutes to run, times out halfway through, and shows data from last night's sync anyway.
Everyone has their own version of the truth. Finance exports their numbers. Sales exports theirs. Operations has a different spreadsheet entirely. The numbers don't match, and half the meeting is spent arguing about whose data is right.
You didn't pay six figures for an ERP to end up back in spreadsheet chaos. But here you are.
Why ERP Systems Are Bad at Reporting
This isn't a bug. It's a fundamental design choice.
ERPs are built as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems. Their job is to record transactions quickly and accurately—processing sales orders, updating inventory, posting journal entries. They're optimised for writes, not reads.
Reporting is the opposite. You're not writing one transaction; you're reading millions of them, aggregating, filtering, and calculating. That's Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)—a completely different workload.
When you run a complex report in your ERP, you're asking a system designed for one thing to do something entirely different. It's like asking a sprinter to run a marathon. They might finish, but it won't be pretty.
The multi-module problem
Your ERP isn't one system—it's a collection of modules. Financials. CRM. Inventory. Sales. Purchasing. Each module stores data in its own structure, optimised for its own purpose.
When you want to answer a question that spans modules—how do sales activities affect inventory levels, or which customers are most profitable after returns—you're trying to join data across these separate structures. The ERP wasn't designed for that. So you're stuck navigating through different modules, exporting separately, and piecing it together manually.
Native dashboards are an afterthought
ERP vendors know customers want dashboards. So they bolt on basic visualisation features. But these are afterthoughts, not core functionality.
You get static tables when you want charts. Limited customisation when you need flexibility. And no support for the advanced analytics that would actually help you make decisions.
So you export to Power BI or Tableau. Now you have another tool to maintain, another place where data can get out of sync, and another system that needs someone to manage it. And if you're running multiple systems that don't talk to each other, the problem compounds—connecting your ERP, CRM, and logistics becomes its own project.
Your business is unique; your ERP is generic
ERPs are built to serve thousands of different businesses. That means they make assumptions about how data should be structured—assumptions that might not match your reality.
Your pricing logic, your customer segments, your product hierarchies—they're specific to you. The ERP's reporting tools are built for the generic case. Every time you need something specific, you're fighting the system's assumptions.
The Hidden Cost of Bad ERP Reporting
You might think slow reports are just an annoyance. They're not. They're bleeding your business.
Finance becomes a bottleneck
Your finance team spends days on month-end close because they're manually reconciling data from multiple exports. They can't answer questions quickly because every answer requires building a new report from scratch.
They should be analysing the business and advising on strategy. Instead, they're doing data entry and spreadsheet wrangling.
Decisions get made on gut feel
When data is hard to access, people stop asking for it. They make decisions based on intuition, or on whatever number they remember from last quarter.
That works until it doesn't. Until you discover a product line has been losing money for six months. Until you realise a sales rep has been discounting below margin. Until a key customer churns because nobody noticed their orders dropping.
Opportunities stay hidden
The best opportunities in your business are sitting in your data. Cross-sell patterns. Pricing optimisation. Customer segments that are growing. But you can't see them because you can't analyse the data properly.
Your competitors with better data infrastructure are finding these opportunities. You're not.
Good people burn out
Nobody became an analyst to spend their days cleaning data exports. Your best people—the ones who could actually generate insights—are stuck doing manual data wrangling.
They'll leave for somewhere that gives them proper tools. And you'll be left with people who don't know any better.
What Actually Fixes ERP Reporting
There's a reason every enterprise eventually builds a data warehouse. It's the only real solution. But not all warehouses deliver—here's why many fail and how to avoid the same mistakes.
A data warehouse sits alongside your ERP. It pulls data from the ERP (and other systems) on a schedule, transforms it into a structure optimised for reporting, and serves it to your BI tools.
This works because:
It's built for reading, not writing. The data warehouse is OLAP-native. It's designed to aggregate millions of rows quickly. Reports that time out in your ERP run in seconds.
It breaks down module silos. The warehouse combines data from across your ERP modules—and from other systems like your ecommerce platform, CRM, or external data sources. One unified view of the business.
It doesn't slow down your ERP. Reporting happens in the warehouse, not the ERP. Your operational systems stay fast for the people who need to use them.
It speaks analyst language. Good data warehouses are structured for how humans think about the business—customers, orders, products—not how the ERP stores transactions internally.
It scales. As your data grows, the warehouse handles it. You're not asking your ERP to do something it was never designed to do.
The modern data stack
Today's data infrastructure typically looks like this:
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Data extraction. Tools that pull data from your ERP (and other sources) via API or database connection. This happens on a schedule—hourly, daily, or real-time depending on your needs.
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Data warehouse. A cloud database optimised for analytics. Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, or a managed solution specific to your ERP.
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Transformation layer. Logic that cleans, combines, and restructures the raw data into something useful. This is where your business rules live—how you define revenue, what counts as an active customer, how products roll up to categories.
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BI and visualisation. The tools your team actually uses. Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or even enhanced Excel connections. Now they're reading from clean, fast, properly structured data.
This sounds like a lot. It is. But it's the difference between fighting your data and using your data.
"But We Already Have a BI Tool"
You might have Power BI or Tableau connected directly to your ERP. That's better than raw exports, but it's not the same as having a proper data foundation.
When BI tools connect directly to the ERP:
Reports are still slow. You're still hitting the OLTP database. Complex queries still take forever.
Business logic lives in the report. Every report contains its own calculations—what counts as revenue, how to handle returns, how to exclude test orders. When the logic needs to change, you're updating dozens of reports.
Different reports give different answers. Without a central transformation layer, two analysts building similar reports will make slightly different assumptions. Now you're back to arguing about whose numbers are right.
You're limited to ERP data. What about your ecommerce platform? Your marketing data? Your external market data? Direct BI connections work for one source at a time.
A BI tool is the last mile. It's how humans interact with data. But it's not infrastructure. You need the data warehouse underneath it.
What Good ERP Reporting Actually Looks Like
When the infrastructure is right:
Finance closes in days, not weeks. The numbers reconcile automatically because they all come from the same source. Variance analysis that used to take days takes minutes.
Questions get answered in minutes. Sales wants to know top customers by product category? It's a simple query. Ops wants inventory turnover by warehouse? Already in the dashboard. Nobody waits for IT to build a custom report.
Everyone sees the same numbers. One source of truth. One definition of revenue. One set of customer segments. Meetings focus on what to do, not whose spreadsheet is correct.
Insights emerge. With data accessible, people start asking better questions. They spot trends. They find anomalies. They identify opportunities that were always there but invisible.
The team does actual analysis. Your analysts analyse. Your finance team advises. Nobody spends their days cleaning exports and fighting report builders.
This isn't a fantasy. It's what happens when you invest in data infrastructure properly.
The Path Forward
You're not going to rip out your ERP. And you shouldn't—it's doing its job. The problem isn't the ERP; it's expecting it to do something it wasn't designed for.
The solution is building the reporting layer it's missing.
Start with the pain. What reports are causing the most frustration? What questions can't you answer? What decisions are being made without data?
Map your data sources. Your ERP is the core, but it's probably not the only system. Ecommerce platform. CRM. Banking data. Marketing platforms. What needs to come together?
Design for how you think. A good data model reflects your business, not your ERP's schema. Customers, orders, products, transactions—structured the way your team actually analyses.
Build the foundation. Extraction, warehouse, transformation. Get the infrastructure right before you worry about dashboards.
Then visualise. Now your BI tools have something proper to connect to. Dashboards become easy because the hard work is already done.
This isn't a weekend project. But it's also not as big as you might think. The right approach, with the right partner, can get you from ERP chaos to proper reporting in months, not years.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Before your next frustrating report export, ask:
- How much time does your team spend cleaning and reconciling data every month?
- How often do reports give different answers depending on who built them?
- What questions about your business can't you answer because the data is too hard to access?
- How many decisions are made on gut feel because waiting for data takes too long?
- What would change if anyone could answer any reasonable question in minutes?
The data is there. Your ERP captured it. The question is whether you can actually use it.
Ready to turn your ERP data into actual insights? Book a call with our team. We'll assess your current reporting pain and show you what proper data infrastructure looks like.
