Partnering for the Future: How CDS IT Solutions Helped Mad Group Take Reporting Fully Cloud-Native With Reports Center

Benefits

• Preserving Mad Group’s advanced reporting while supporting full reliance on the cloud
• Freeing Mad Group from on-premises infrastructure burdens
• Arming partner CDS IT Solutions with Reports Center demo capabilities showcasing complex and flexible reporting features

As a trusted insightsoftware partner, CDS IT Solutions has been working with Jet solutions for years, helping clients streamline reporting and unlock deeper insights from their ERP data. But when Mad Group—a longtime Jet Analytics user—decided to modernize its entire infrastructure, it presented a unique challenge.

Looking to future-proof its operations, Mad Group undertook a significant shift to a completely cloud-hosted environment. This meant saying goodbye to on-premises servers and Active Directory, posing unprecedented challenges to its existing setup using Jet Hub and Jet Analytics from insightsoftware.

Adapting to Change: From Jet Hub to Reports Center

When Mad Group committed to transitioning entirely to the cloud, it unknowingly rendered its traditional on-premises Jet Analytics setup incompatible. The on-premises Jet Hub deployment was tightly integrated with the legacy infrastructure, which relied on physical servers and Active Directory. Upon making the leap to deploy Business Central SaaS, Mad Group faced a critical gap between maintaining its trusted Jet Analytics capabilities while aligning with its new cloud-based operations.

That’s where CDS IT Solutions stepped in with Reports Center.

Reports Center, insightsoftware’s modernized, cloud-based report management solution, provided a seamless fit for its new infrastructure and allowed the company to retain its advanced reporting functionality without sacrificing cloud compatibility. It gave Mad Group the ability to run, manage, and distribute reports in a secure, cloud-friendly interface—without the infrastructure burden.

The Partner’s Role: Guiding a Seamless Transition

CDS handled the transition and testing, verifying that Reports Center could support real-world reporting demands across multiple departments and business scenarios.

Key successes during the rollout included:

• Power Query integration confirmed support for advanced queries using table builder data.
• Multi-company reporting validated Reports Center’s ability to run and export multi-company financials into a single, polished Excel file.
• Real-time data refresh capabilities provided consistent performance and accurate data from Business Central SaaS—meeting the expectations of both leadership and finance teams.

The migration to Reports Center marked a major modernization milestone for Mad Group, enabling it to fully capitalize on cloud-first infrastructure. By transitioning to this robust, cloud-compatible solution, Mad Group preserved the advanced reporting capabilities vital to its business operations while opening the door for greater scalability and efficiency in the future.

Dual Service: Clients and Partners Benefit

Beyond Mad Group’s implementation, Seater noted that Reports Center offers valuable functionality for partners like CDS IT Solutions as well. The cloud-based delivery platform not only enhances the client experience—it also enables CDS to demo features remotely, simplify onboarding, and reduce friction during handoff. 

“I must admit I’ve got Reports Center as well, and I’ve been quite impressed with it,” Seater said. “For my own needs, it’s a great tool. I can show clients how it looks and how it behaves with very little setup. I can demonstrate several different types of scenarios which I know are complicated in Excel or BC native reporting and really show how easily Reports Center handles them.” 

Multi-Company Consolidation

In Business Central

One of the standout use cases Seater always demonstrates in Reports Center involves building a consolidated report across multiple companies in Business Central—a common yet complex requirement for growing businesses.

He begins by using the Table Builder to pull in data from different companies and feeds that information into Power Query on the backend of the report. From there, he returns the data as a pivot table, enabling flexible analysis across entities.

In Excel

Another Reports Center function Seater focuses on is multi-company consolidation using Excel sheet commands. Each company’s data is pulled into its own tab within a single spreadsheet, allowing stakeholders to view performance at both individual and consolidated levels.“Anyone can put together a financial report,” Seater noted, “but doing it across multiple companies adds a layer of complexity. That’s where Reports Center really shows its strength.”

Ad Hoc Business Reports

Seater also highlighted how he personally uses Reports Center to run a variety of business reports that showcase both its flexibility and performance.

One example he shared was a “Top 10 Sales by Year” report. Built using Jet’s Table Builder, the report automatically pulls relevant sales data in the background, applies logic, and returns a clean, ranked list—all within Excel. The process is seamless, and the report is powered entirely through Reports Center.

In another case, Seater created a report comparing data across two different companies. Using Excel’s sheet commands, he expanded the results into separate tabs and pulled them together for multi-company visibility—demonstrating that even more complex reporting structures worked without issue.

“They both ran exactly as expected,” Seater said. “And the run times weren’t bad at all—they were reasonably quick.”

For Seater, these examples not only confirm Reports Center’s functionality for advanced reporting scenarios—they also reflect real-world needs that many finance teams face when working in Business Central.

Looking Ahead

For Seater, Mad Group’s success with Reports Center is just the beginning. As more organizations move away from on-premises setups, CDS expects to see increasing demand for cloud-native reporting solutions that meet users where they already work—securely, reliably, and in real time.

“What Reports Center does is remove a key barrier to adoption. Clients don’t need to think about infrastructure—they just open a browser and run their report. It’s that simple.”

To learn more about how Reports Center can help your business, or how to join the insightsoftware Partner Program, contact us today.