Power BI and Business Central: the first reports to build
Every day Business Central collects a huge amount of information: orders, invoices, payments, inventory movements. The problem in many companies is that this data stays locked inside ERP screens or ends up in spreadsheets rebuilt by hand every month. Power BI is there to turn it into clear, up-to-date reports that the people making decisions can actually use.
You don’t need to start with a huge project. A few well-built reports are worth more than dozens of charts nobody looks at.
How Power BI connects to Business Central
Power BI reads Business Central data through a standard connector, which relies on the APIs and web services the ERP exposes. In practice you choose the environment and company, select the tables or published pages you need, and Power BI imports them to build the data model.
Business Central also offers ready-made Power BI reports and apps for some areas, such as finance, sales, purchasing and inventory, and lets you view Power BI reports directly inside ERP pages. They are an excellent starting point for working out what you really need. The available options change over time, so always check Microsoft’s current documentation.
When the standard reports aren’t enough, you build custom ones, sometimes exposing specific data through custom APIs developed as extensions.
The first reports to build
Here are five reports that give a small or mid-sized business value almost straight away.
Sales by customer and item over time
This is the report to start with. It shows revenue by customer, by item or category and by period, compared with the same period last year. It helps you see which customers are growing and which are shrinking, which products drive sales and how seasonality plays out.
Margins
Revenue alone isn’t enough: a customer who buys a lot can still bring in little. A margin report by customer, item and salesperson shows where you really make money. For it to be reliable, item costs in Business Central must be correct and up to date, which we’ll come back to shortly.
Overdue receivables and customer aging
A report on open receivables, broken down into aging buckets, is invaluable for whoever chases payments. At a glance you see how much is overdue, for how long and from which customers. Linked to sales data, it also helps you judge the reliability of your most important customers.
Inventory value and slow movers
Inventory ties up cash. A report showing stock value by location and category, alongside items that haven’t moved for a long time, helps you decide what to reorder, what to clear and where you are holding more stock than you need.
Cash flow overview
Expected receipts from customers, scheduled payments to vendors and bank balances, laid out on the same timeline, give a view of cash over the coming weeks. It doesn’t replace full financial planning, but it is an excellent control tool for management.
Before the reports, data quality
A report is only as reliable as the data behind it. Before building your first dashboards, check a few points:
- consistent master data: customers without duplicates, items with correct categories and units of measure, salespeople and regions assigned consistently;
- item costs: without correct costs, any margin report is misleading;
- dimensions: if you use Business Central dimensions, such as department, region or product line, make sure they are always filled in and with the same criteria;
- timely posting: if documents and payments are posted days late, reports show a reality that has already moved on.
Work on reports often brings exactly these problems to light. That is a good thing: better to find them in a chart than in a wrong decision.
Who should own the reports
Reports work when someone is responsible for them. It helps to separate two roles:
- those who define the questions: the sales manager for sales, finance for receivables and cash, the logistics manager for inventory. They decide which indicators are needed and how to read them;
- those who build and maintain the model: an internal person with technical skills or an external consultant, who looks after connections, the data model and changes over time.
Without a clear owner, reports multiply, contradict each other and lose credibility.
Refresh and permissions
Two practical points to decide early on.
Refresh: reports published to the Power BI service can be refreshed automatically on a schedule. Choose a frequency that matches how they are used: for many management reports a daily refresh is enough, while some operational data may need more frequent updates.
Permissions: not everyone needs to see everything. Margins, staff data and financial information should only be shared with those who need them. Power BI lets you manage access to reports and, where needed, restrict the data each user can see. Remember too that the connection to Business Central respects the permissions of the account used to read the data.
Let’s talk
If you want to turn your Business Central data into reports that help decision-makers, starting with the ones your company really needs, get in touch: we’ll take the first steps together.