🕐 Reading Time: 6 min

Summary

In this edition, we’ll cover the following:

• Why reporting often fails to deliver after ERP go-live—and what’s really missing

• How to design reporting for alignment, scalability, and decision-making

• What role semantic modeling plays in building a future-proof reporting foundation

Why ERP Reporting Fails After Go-Live—and How Finance Teams Can Fix It

The ERP is live. The go-live checklist is complete. Processes have moved over. Transactions are flowing. The hardest part—technically speaking—is behind you.

But for some reason, the business still can’t get the reports it needs.

Month-end is still manual. Decision-makers are still relying on offline spreadsheets. Finance is still cleaning data before it can analyze it. And no one seems completely sure which numbers are right.

It’s a familiar story—and a frustrating one.

Reporting is (almost) always the piece that gets scoped too late, resourced too lightly, and taken for granted. It’s assumed to “just work” once the ERP is live.

But without thoughtful reporting design, what you’re left with is this uncomfortable in-between: The old systems are gone. The new one is live. But the business doesn’t feel more in control.

This newsletter is about why that happens—and how to fix it. We’ll break down the real reasons ERP reporting underdelivers, what your team can do about it, and how to design for both today’s needs and tomorrow’s goals.

1. Decision-First Reporting: Start with what the business actually needs to know

One of the most common mistakes after an ERP go-live is defaulting to what’s familiar.

“Let’s just rebuild the old reports.”

“Can we migrate the dashboards we used before?”

“What did we used to show the board?”

It feels like a logical starting point—but it skips over the most important question:

Are those reports still fit for purpose in the new environment?

Chances are, they were designed years ago—under different business conditions, for different stakeholders, and often without clearly defined logic. Rebuilding them as-is only carries those problems forward.

Instead, your team needs to pause and conduct a structured analysis:

• What decisions does each report actually support?

• Are the assumptions behind those metrics still valid?

• What critical reports are non-negotiable and need to be available on day one?

• Are there better, faster, or more reliable ways to surface this information now?

This kind of analysis is critical—not just for reducing noise, but for ensuring reporting aligns with how your business actually operates today.

For example:

• Your regional teams might need to assess customer profitability at the product-channel level to inform new pricing models.

• Ops may need visibility into fulfillment cycle time across warehouse and product families to identify bottlenecks.

• Finance might want earlier signals of margin erosion—requiring new calculations and slicing logic the ERP doesn’t natively support.

These aren’t cosmetic tweaks. They require you to rethink the reporting purpose—not just its format.

If a report doesn’t serve a clear analytical or decision-making function, then at this stage, it likely belongs on the backlog—not in the first wave.

By starting from business decisions—not legacy outputs—you ensure that reporting is designed to move the organization forward, not just recreate what’s familiar.

2. Stop rebuilding one-offs: Design for reusability and scale

In the weeks after go-live, reporting often becomes a scramble. Leadership needs dashboards. Functional leads want their views recreated. The pressure is on to “get something out”—fast.

So your team does what it can: They copy a version from before. Plug in the new data. Make quick adjustments. Ship it.

But when every report is built in isolation—with its own logic, filters, naming conventions, and assumptions—you’re not building a scalable reporting environment. You’re building a pile of one-offs.

And the consequences add up quickly:

• KPI inconsistency: Teams reference the same metric name—like “revenue” or “on-time delivery”—but calculate it differently depending on who built the report.

• Troubleshooting headaches: When something breaks, no one’s quite sure where the logic lives—or whether it was correct to begin with.

• Slower analysis cycles: Analysts spend hours reconciling numbers between reports instead of answering actual business questions.

• Erosion of trust: Leadership sees conflicting numbers across reports, questions the credibility of the data, and reverts back to Excel.

This isn't a tooling issue—it’s a design issue.

To avoid this, your reporting environment needs to be built with reusability in mind from the start:

• Define core measures centrally—things like margin, customer count, and revenue should have one source of logic, not five versions.

• Document how those metrics are calculated so new reports can reuse them confidently.

• Standardize filters, hierarchies, and naming conventions so that every report speaks the same language, regardless of who built it.

Power BI makes this easier—but the key is creating a semantic foundation your team can build from.

Think of it like this: you're not just producing outputs. You're building infrastructure.

And with that infrastructure in place, your team can respond faster to new requests, onboard analysts more efficiently, and shift focus from “what’s broken” to “what’s changing.”

That’s the difference between a reporting system that “works"—and one that scales.

3. Accuracy Isn’t Enough—You Need Alignment

Accuracy is non-negotiable.

Your team needs to trust that the numbers are correct, the calculations are sound, and the data is up to date. That’s the baseline.

But in practice, what derails most reporting efforts isn’t technical error—it’s disagreement around interpretation.

One team reports on “active customers” based on any account with a transaction in the last 12 months.

Another defines it as customers with recurring revenue.

A third uses system logins as the criteria.

All three are valid.

All three might pull from the same source data.

But without alignment, each report tells a slightly different story—and the business starts second-guessing which version to believe.

This is the trap:

Even perfectly accurate reports can’t drive action if no one agrees on what the numbers mean.

Here’s how this plays out:

• Review meetings get sidetracked by “why doesn’t this match what I saw yesterday?”

• Different teams create their own reports to reflect their preferred logic

• Analysts spend time refereeing rather than analyzing

• Executives lose trust in the numbers—regardless of accuracy

To fix this, your reporting process needs to focus on both precision and alignment.

That means:

• Facilitating clear conversations across finance, operations, and IT on how key metrics should be defined and used

• Resolving edge cases early—like how to handle returns, inactive accounts, or partial period data

• Building and maintaining a shared glossary of KPIs and business terms that reflects current business logic and is visible inside the reporting tools themselves

It’s not about over-engineering. It’s about giving every stakeholder the same lens—so that when they see a number, they interpret it the same way.

We often recommend forming a cross-functional KPI committee or reporting governance group at the outset of any ERP reporting initiative. Their job isn’t to slow things down—it’s to make sure that as reports roll out, there’s a shared definition of what “good” looks like.

Because once your team is aligned, accurate reporting becomes actionable reporting.

And that’s what drives better decisions.

4. Treat Reporting as a Core Workstream—Not a Cleanup Task

In many ERP programs, reporting gets sidelined.

There’s a clear plan—and dedicated resources—for finance, supply chain, data migration, and even change management. But reporting is often treated as something to “sort out later,” once the core system is live.

The assumption is that once the data is flowing, reports will naturally follow.

But that’s rarely how it plays out.

When reporting is under-scoped or delayed, your team ends up scrambling to meet post-go-live expectations without the structure or resources to deliver:

• Business users ask for views the system wasn’t designed to support.

• Reporting timelines slip as every new request feels like a fire drill.

• Excel fills the gap—quietly reintroducing manual effort, errors, and inefficiency.

• Leadership starts questioning whether the new systems were worth the investment at all.

The cost here isn’t just rework. It’s loss of trust.

When decision-makers can’t get the visibility they expected from the new system, the perception is that nothing has changed—even if the underlying processes are more integrated or automated.

That’s why reporting needs to be elevated to a full-fledged workstream in your ERP program.

That means:

• Assigning clear ownership—ideally a reporting lead with both business context and technical influence

• Including reporting milestones in the core rollout plan—not tacked on at the end

• Treating report delivery and enablement as part of business readiness—not something that happens after training

Your team already knows that reporting is where a lot of the value—and most of the scrutiny—lands.

It’s how the business experiences the ERP.

It’s how leadership tracks impact.

It’s how results are surfaced, questioned, and acted on.

And if that reporting layer is weak, it doesn't matter how robust the backend is. The system will be seen as incomplete—or worse, ineffective.

By giving reporting the same attention and structure as every other critical stream, you ensure the ERP isn’t just technically live—it’s actually delivering insight.

5. Build the Foundation Now—So You’re Not Rebuilding It Later

One of the most common reasons ERP reporting struggles to scale is this:

1. No one took the time to define what the data actually means.

2. Not just where it lives. Not just how it moves.

3. But what it means to the business.

That’s what a semantic layer does.

And while your team might not use that term day-to-day, they’ll feel its absence every time a new report needs to be built from scratch—or when two reports contradict each other because of subtle differences in logic.

A semantic layer is simply a shared structure that translates raw data into business concepts your teams can work with consistently.

It’s where you define things like:

• What counts as a customer

• How revenue is recognized across currencies and entities

• Which product groups roll up into which categories

• How you determine if a project is active, complete, or overdue

When these definitions live only in people’s heads—or inside one-off reports—your reporting becomes brittle, inconsistent, and difficult to extend.

But when they're captured centrally, in a reusable layer within your model, everything changes.

Your team can:

• Build new reports faster, using trusted logic

• Ensure consistency across teams and time periods

• Enable new capabilities—like forecasting, variance analysis, or scenario modeling—without starting over

And you don’t need to wait for a full data warehouse project to make this happen.

In Power BI (and Fabric), your semantic layer is the model.

If you take the time to define your measures, dimensions, and hierarchies clearly from the start, you lay the foundation for everything that comes next.

This is how you future-proof your reporting environment:

• It makes scaling easier.

• It makes planning possible.

• It ensures every report—no matter who builds it—tells the same story.

And that’s what makes reporting valuable—not just a part of the post-go-live checklist.

6. Reporting Is the Bridge Between ERP and Decision-Making

If your team is still relying on manual workarounds, rebuilding reports from scratch, or struggling to get consistent answers from the data—this isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong.

It’s a sign that one critical step remains:

Translating raw ERP data into structured, decision-ready insight.

This is the phase where many programs stall—not because the system is broken, but because reporting was never designed with enough clarity, alignment, or foresight.

What’s needed now isn’t a major rework. It’s a shift in approach.

One that focuses on:

• Establishing clear, shared definitions of key metrics and business terms

• Structuring the reporting layer for consistency and reuse—not one-off builds

• Aligning stakeholders around what “good” looks like across teams

• Creating a foundation that supports not just visibility, but future capabilities like forecasting and planning

Reporting is where the business begins to experience the value of the ERP system. It’s where strategy meets operations.

And it’s where confidence in the numbers either takes hold—or quietly erodes.

Treat it as the bridge—not the afterthought—and you position your ERP investment to deliver what it was meant to: better decisions, faster action, and lasting impact.

P.S. If This Was Useful, Let’s Talk.

If you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem for reporting and analytics, this is our sweet spot. We help finance and ops teams turn Power BI into an enterprise-grade reporting and planning platform—purpose-built for what comes after go-live.

Book a 30-minute strategy call to explore how a well-structured semantic layer (and the right Microsoft stack) can support your goals.