Filling in the GAAP with statistical data and KPIs

Modern ERP solutions like Dynamics 365 enable organizations to seamlessly integrate and report on both financial and operational data—such as employee hours, room occupancy, or volunteer contributions—using statistical accounts and dimensions, providing deeper insights and more actionable KPIs for informed business decisions.

Gaining deep insight into your business operation requires access to more than GAAP financial data. While GAAP financials provide a solid foundation, incorporating operational data into your reports and key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you identify trends, monitor performance over time and against industry benchmarks, and make more informed business decisions. However, integrating non-financial or statistical data into financial reports has traditionally been a challenge — mainly because many accounting applications do not support it. Rand Group helps clients overcome this challenge with modern solutions that support statistical data and KPIs. Here’s how.

What is a statistical account?

Statistical accounts allow you to capture and include operational or statistical data in your financial reports. This data is non-financial in nature but vital to your business, such as number of employees, days in the month, square footage, sales region, or employee hours.

While standard financial reports show metrics like profit for the last quarter, adding statistical or operational data lets you analyze profit by region, department, employee, product line, and many other attributes.

Why is it difficult to include statistical or non-financial data in reports?

Traditionally, including operational data in reports has been challenging because it requires software to collect additional attributes with every transaction. For example, if you want to track costs associated with a trade show, you need to tag every relevant transaction accordingly. Most legacy ERP applications don’t support this. As a result, companies have often expanded their chart of accounts with extra segments or resorted to time-consuming Excel-based reporting — or both.

How do modern ERP systems make it easy to track and report on statistical data?

Modern solutions like Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations support statistical accounts and dimensions. Dimensions are tags that you can assign to transactions, capturing multiple pieces of operational data. This enables you to update statistical accounts with dimension data. For example, if you’re tracking employee count, you can set up an Employee dimension, and whenever you add a new employee to a transaction, the statistical account updates automatically.

Practical examples of statistical data in action

Consider a few scenarios where statistical accounts and dimensions deliver real value:

• Professional services: Beyond tracking project billings, you can monitor hours logged by employees, hours budgeted, average revenue per hour billed, utilization rates, and compare these metrics across time, projects, customers, and budgets.
• Hospitality: Track nightly room occupancy in a statistical account and report on average daily occupancy, occupancy by month, year, or by property.
• Nonprofits: Measure revenue collected per event attendee, track the number of individuals helped (by fund, grant, or region), or monitor volunteer contributions and how they vary month to month.

These examples show how statistical counts and dimensions offer a flexible, detailed view of your operations that goes far beyond traditional financials.

How can you use statistical and operational data?

With robust reporting capabilities in modern ERP platforms, you can instantly combine financial data from the general ledger with non-financial data to create real-time dashboards, KPIs, and metrics that reveal what’s really happening in your business. Statistical accounts become a powerful tool to deliver actionable insight beyond basic GAAP numbers.

To explore how statistical data and KPIs can drive your business forward, check out our insights on the latest capabilities in Business Central or learn about Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations.

Next steps

Rand Group specializes in helping organizations leverage the full power of their ERP systems to capture, analyze, and report on both financial and operational data. Our expert consultants will guide you in setting up statistical accounts, dimensions, and KPIs tailored to your unique business needs. Whether you are looking to move away from legacy systems, optimize your use of Dynamics 365 Business Central or Finance & Operations, or need support with advanced reporting and analytics, Rand Group can help.

Ready to get more value from your data? Contact Rand Group today to learn how we can help you transform your operational and financial reporting for better decision-making.