Tyler Munis Reporting Explained: Canned Reports, Cubes, SSRS and Power BI

Tyler Munis reporting is a stack, not a single tool

Ask five Munis users how they get a report and you will hear five answers: run the canned report, export it to Excel, pull a cube, ask IT for an SSRS report, or open the Power BI dashboard. All five are right, because Tyler Munis reporting is really a stack of tools that sit on the same ledger. Tyler now sells the product as Enterprise ERP, powered by Munis, but the reporting layers are the same. Many wasted hours in a finance office come from using the wrong layer for the job, such as rebuilding a monthly budget report by hand when a cube could refresh it, or writing a custom report when a saved canned report would do. This guide walks through each layer, what it is good at, where it falls short, one worked example with numbers, and a checklist for sorting your own report list.

Layer 1: canned reports, report options and Saved Reports

Canned reports are the standard reports that ship with Munis and sit in the menu of each module: the trial balance in General Ledger, the YTD Budget report, vendor and invoice reports in Accounts Payable, and billing and receivable reports in Utility Billing. Each one has report options, the screen where you set the fiscal year, period, fund or org range, sort order and subtotal sequence. Those options are easy to overlook. A canned report with the right options saved is often all a department head needs. Output can go to the screen, to a PDF or straight to Excel with the Excel toolbar button, and the Saved Reports program keeps finished reports so they can be held, reprinted or deleted later. Reports can also be stored in Tyler Content Manager, the document store that ships with Munis. For a single balance, Account Inquiry is faster than any report and is the number every other layer should tie back to. Canned reports fall short when the layout is wrong for the audience, or when the same report has to be run fifteen times, once per department.

Layer 2: Tyler Hub cards and Global Search

Tyler Hub is the home page in current Munis versions. It is built from cards, small panels that show alerts, approvals, notifications and other content, arranged on pages a user can add and rename. Global Search finds a vendor, an account or a program by name, which Tyler training material calls Google for Munis. Hub is not a reporting tool in the full sense, but it is the right place for the handful of figures someone checks every morning, such as items waiting for approval or a department's remaining budget. If a manager prints the same report each day just to read one number, a Hub card is usually the better answer. Hub is a poor fit for anything that has to be printed, compared across years or sent outside the building.

Layer 3: Munis cubes in Excel

Cubes are often the least used layer in a Munis office. A cube is an OLAP database, short for online analytical processing, that Munis builds from the ledger so Excel can summarize it quickly. You connect from Excel through Data, Get Data, From Analysis Services, sign in with your Munis credentials, and pick a cube such as GLRevenueAndExpenseCube. The data lands in a PivotTable, so you drag fund, department, object code and period into rows and columns instead of writing a report. Cities commonly use the General Ledger Revenue and Expense cube for budget monitoring, the Projection cube for budget development, project cubes for capital projects, and payroll and HR cubes for position and vacancy analysis. Two cautions apply. Cube data is usually refreshed overnight, so a cube can run a day behind the live ledger, and a saved workbook refreshes every time it opens unless you break the connection. Before anyone relies on a new cube workbook, tie its totals to Account Inquiry.

Layer 4: SSRS and Tyler Reporting Services

SSRS, SQL Server Reporting Services, is the Microsoft reporting engine behind the Munis report writer. It is the right layer when the output has to look the same every time, run on a schedule, or combine data a canned report keeps apart, such as a council packet page that shows budget, actual and encumbrances by department with prior year beside it. For SaaS hosted Enterprise ERP, Tyler states that clients get the default reports built into the menu, and that writing custom reports with the SSRS report writer requires Tyler Reporting Services, which is licensed separately. Self hosted sites may have their own SQL Server and report server, which changes who can build reports and where they run. Either way, SSRS work needs someone who knows SQL and the Munis tables, and every custom report becomes something your office has to maintain after each upgrade. Build one only after the canned report and the cube have both been ruled out.

Layer 5: Power BI and other outside tools

Power BI is the right layer when people outside finance need to explore the numbers themselves, or when Munis data has to sit beside data from another system, such as EnerGov permits, a work order system or a utility meter feed. Power BI can read the same Analysis Services cubes Excel uses, or tables and SQL views that IT exposes from the Munis database or from a nightly extract. The tool is the easy part. The hard part is governance: deciding which measure is the official one, who owns each dataset, how often it refreshes, and who is allowed to see payroll or vendor bank data. A Power BI dashboard that does not tie to the trial balance does more harm than no dashboard, because council members will quote it. Treat the dashboard as a view of numbers that already reconcile, never as the place where the reconciling happens.

Which Munis reporting tool fits which report

• One balance, right now: Account Inquiry.
• Standard monthly report for one department: the canned report with saved report options.
• The same report for every department, or any slicing by fund, org, object and period: a cube in Excel.
• A few figures someone checks every day: a Tyler Hub card.
• A fixed layout that runs on a schedule or goes into the council packet: SSRS, through Tyler Reporting Services if you are SaaS hosted.
• Self service exploration across departments, or Munis data joined to other systems: Power BI on top of cubes or SQL views.
• Audit schedules on the PBC list: canned reports exported to Excel, tied to the trial balance and kept with the workpapers.

When two layers could both do the job, pick the lower one. It is cheaper to maintain and survives upgrades better.

Worked example: moving a monthly budget report to a cube

Here is an illustrative example with made up numbers. A city with 14 departments sends each department head a budget to actual report every month. Today an accountant runs the YTD Budget report once per department, exports each one to Excel, deletes the extra rows and reformats the columns, about 25 minutes per department, or 350 minutes a month. Over a year that is 70 hours spent rebuilding the same report. Instead, the accountant builds one Excel workbook on the General Ledger Revenue and Expense cube, with department as a filter and object code down the rows, and saves a tab per department. Each month she refreshes the workbook, checks the totals, and saves a PDF per tab, about 45 minutes in all. Before the first month goes out she ties the cube to Account Inquiry. Account Inquiry shows general fund expenditures of $6,412,880 year to date; the cube shows $6,398,300. The $14,580 difference is one accounts payable batch posted that afternoon, which the cube will pick up overnight. She writes the cube refresh date on every page, so nobody mistakes a one day lag for an error.

Checklist: sort your Munis report list in one afternoon

• List every report your office produces on a schedule, who receives it and how long it takes.
• For each one, check whether a canned report with saved report options already gives the reader what they need.
• Move anything run once per department or fund into a cube workbook, and tie its totals to Account Inquiry before first use.
• Put daily one number checks on Tyler Hub cards instead of printed reports.
• Keep SSRS for fixed layouts and scheduled output, confirm whether you own Tyler Reporting Services, and write down who maintains each custom report.
• Before building a Power BI dashboard, name the official source for each measure and the person who owns the dataset.
• Print the data date on every report and dashboard page.
• Retire any report nobody has opened in the last two cycles.

Expect some scheduled reports to move down a layer, and a few to stop altogether once you ask who reads them.

Pick the layer, then build the report

Good Tyler Munis reporting is less about any one tool and more about matching each report to the lowest layer that does the job: Account Inquiry for one number, canned reports for standard output, cubes for slicing, SSRS for fixed layouts, and Power BI for exploration across systems. Get that match right and month end reporting takes less time, and the numbers in every layer agree. If your report list has grown faster than your staff, our Tyler Munis consulting work starts by sorting that list and tying every layer back to the ledger.