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Every month, your finance team produces the numbers. The reports go out, the board meets, the quarter turns. It works. But something is quietly going to waste: the team spends most of its time producing the figures and almost none interrogating them, and if you are honest, nobody is completely sure the numbers would survive a hard question.
Then the hard question arrives. An overnight export fails. A figure looks wrong. An auditor asks where a number came from. Suddenly "the reports went out on time" is not the point. Someone has to prove the number is right, and on Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations or Business Central, that is where the trouble starts: restricted tables, awkward schemas, Azure dependencies, and figures that will not agree across entities and currencies.
Extraction is the easy part
Here is the thing you learn at the bottom of that hole, and it is worth more than the tool that got you there: getting the data out of Dynamics is the easy part. Anyone can point a connector at a database and pull tables all day. Making the sub-ledger and the general ledger agree, handling intercompany, and taming the schema quirks that catch generalists out, that is the work. Extraction moves rows. It does not make them true.
Most reporting projects lose their time, and nearly all of their risk, in exactly that gap: the reconciliation. It is the expensive, invisible part. And it is the part a connector on its own will never do for you.
Two honest ways to climb out
There are two ways to reach a reconciled foundation on Dynamics. You build a bespoke data warehouse, shaped to your estate from scratch. Or you start from a pre-built one that already knows the Dynamics data model.
We will give you the unfashionable version of that advice, because we sell both. We build bespoke warehouses, and we make Reveal, our own pre-built foundation. So when your model is genuinely unusual and a bespoke build is the right answer, we will tell you to build, even though we would rather sell you Reveal. That is the whole reason to ask someone who offers both.
Twenty years of doing nothing but Dynamics data, back through the AX and NAV lineage, taught us exactly where the numbers stop agreeing. It also taught us what a data foundation actually has to be. Three things, no more:
- Reconciled. The number that reaches the board is the number that left the ledger. Everything else is secondary.
- Yours, wherever you report. Azure SQL, an on-premise SQL Server, or another database, with all your data including custom tables and fields, not a locked-in subset.
- Supported by specialists. When you need help it comes from people who have had to make an intercompany balance, not a ticket queue.
Where Reveal fits
Reveal is our pre-built, self-reconciling foundation for Dynamics 365 Finance and the wider Dynamics family. It arrives already knowing the data model, extracts from D365 Finance and Operations (Data Lake and Synapse) and Business Central, and lands the data pre-reconciled, running incremental or full refreshes on your schedule. The difference is not that it moves data. It is that the data arrives already agreeing.
And it is not a black box you are handed and left to run. The Reveal data connector comes with the consultancy around it: we implement it, tailor it to your entities and your chart of accounts, and support it. You are the one who has to defend the numbers to the board. Our job is to make sure they hold.
The better place
One finance team we work with used to run overnight exports that regularly failed against Azure restrictions. On a good morning the analysts reported on yesterday's figures. On a bad one they had nothing until lunch. Since moving onto a reconciled Reveal foundation they refresh through the day, and when a number looks odd they drill into it in minutes rather than defending a guess. Same team, same people. The only thing that changed is that the numbers can be trusted.
That is the real goal, and it is worth saying plainly. Not more data, faster. Trustworthy data, sooner. Finance stops producing reports and starts interrogating them, which was the job all along.
Find out which route fits you
Tell us what you run and what your reporting needs to do, and we will tell you honestly whether Reveal gets you there faster, or whether a bespoke build fits you better. We sell both, so the comparison is a straight one, with the cost shown before you commit.
Talk to us about Reveal, or compare it with a bespoke build.