Management Reporter Drilldown Anomaly

Sometimes issues make sense even when you wish something worked differently. I came across a case like this in Management Reporter last week.  A client has a variety of reports for specific users, that contain the main accounts that each particular user is interested in. 

For example, for the user Bob Smith, the row format includes the range of  accounts from 4100 to 4800 as the following screenshot shows.

When the report is generated, and you drilldown on the row, you see all of the accounts in the range as expected.

But, let's say that you want to exclude the account 000-4510-01 because the user should not be able to see that account, Cost of Goods Sold.  So, you return to the row format, and update it accordingly:

What is key in this example is that we subtracted out the account we wanted to exclude, rather than modify the range.  When you subtract in this manner, the result is not what you might expect when you generate the report:



The account still appears on the drilldown report, although no amounts are displayed.  I understand. logically, why it is working this way-- as the account is included in the range and then subtracted. In the client's case, however, they would prefer that the account not appear at all.  And you will want to keep this in mind when designing reports and subtracting multiple dimensions.  As a workaround, you can avoid using the subtraction functionality and using smaller ranges instead in your row format.

On a side note, there was an earlier known issue where in this case the totals on the drilldown report would be incorrect as well.  But this has been resolved in the latest version of MR 2012.

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.