Here’s 4 simple ways to speed up your Jet Reports

Us finance folk are all in the same boat, we have a swathe of reports that we frequently use to give indicators of how the business is performing, in fact, we’d be lost without them. If you have an ERP like Microsoft Business Central or Navision, then chances are these reports are made using Jet.

While I’m a huge fan of Jet Reports thanks to their flexibility and ease of use, I’ve seen reports that take hours to run and generate, which effectively means you’ll need to either run them on a spare computer or take a really long coffee break while they do their thing. (Good excuse to go and get your 10,000 steps, I guess…)

That doesn’t have to be the way, though. There are many simple tweaks and best practices which can keep the caffeine levels down, and ensure you get your numbers submitted on time.

I recently reduced a customer’s Jet Report run time by 30% and it only took me 15 mins.

Below are 4 simple tips (or sins to avoid) that make the difference:

1. Remove legacy tabs which make all the same data calls, therefore doubling the workload for Jet

2. Move the heavy “calculation” tabs to the end of the workbook. Jet goes through tab by tab, so by moving the tabs to the end there’s less stress on Excel while things are being calculated

3. If you use a lot of NL calls in individual cells with replication in rows, this is a fast track to a slow report. Consider whether ‘=LINK’ could come in handy, so you could convert these to a lighter NF version of the query

4. When you have tabs galore, consider if they’re actually needed. There might be a better way of presenting your data (a filtered view for example) which would be less of a drain for Jet than your current report

Finally, because I can never help myself when faced with a complex report - have you asked yourself and your team why they need it and if they need it? (See my prior Jet Reports blog entry for further details)

If the report isn’t something you use in its entirety, perhaps it’s time for a refresh, and then the old report will take just seconds to run!

Month end submission? Completed it, mate.