Introduction to Generic Inquiries

Created by Harry Lewis, Modified on Tue, 16 Jul at 9:34 AM by Gabriel Michaud

This feature requires Microsoft 365 or Excel 2021 or higher. Experimentally, Excel 2010 or higher can be used. See the Prerequisites for additional information.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Overview
Prepare to use a generic inquiry
Configuration
Basic example using GI function

Overview

Generic Inquiries in Acumatica offer a way to extract the specific data you need and present it to reporting functions for analysis. But they are not just for reports – they can be used in dashboards, made available to BI tools, and offer drill down capabilities for even more detailed analysis. Learn more in Acumatica Generic Inquiries for Reporting and Analytics.

The Generic Inquiry writer is a reporting tool that can access any data in Acumatica - including data stored in customized fields - and publish it, export it to Excel, or format it for OData. The OData option exposes the data in the Open Data Format, which is supported by business intelligence tools such as Velixo.

Velixo provides several GI functions. In this article, we explain how to begin using these functions.

Note: MYOB Acumatica users wanting to use the Generic Inquiry functionality will need to contact their business partner about obtaining an add-on license.

Important: ... Since Generic Inquiries can return a large amount of data, it is recommended to ALWAYS use a filter with Generic Inquiries - so as to limit the amount of data that has to be transferred from your ERP.

Prepare to use a generic inquiry

Follow these steps to prepare for accessing a generic inquiry from a Velixo function:

Go to the Generic Inquiry page in Acumatica
Access the inquiry from the Inquiry Title lookup.
For the inquiry, check the Expose via OData box. This will make the inquiry available for use with Velixo.
Note the Inquiry Title. This will be used for the Name parameter of a GI function.

In this example of the GI function, the inquiry title AR-Invoices and Memos is given for the Name parameter:

=GI("Demo", "AR-Invoices and Memos")

Configuration

Various configuration settings can be used to optimize performance (by restricting the amount of data that is drawn from the generic inquiry). After adding one of the GI functions to a workbook, we click Options in the Acumatica ribbon to display Options window and define the Generic Inquiries Options.

Basic example of using the GI function

Consider this basic example of using the GI function:

=GI("Demo", "AR-Invoices and Memos", "Status eq 'Open'")

Result:

This will produce results similar to what is shown in the figure below, and lists all of the "Open" records in the AR-Invoices and Memos generic inquiry in the Demo connection.

In the GI function article, learn how to use the GI function, and see a number of examples.