How to use Power BI reports in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

I want to show you the Power BI reports in Dynamics 365 Business Central. They were released in 2024 release Wave 2. Let’s take a look at them.

Embedded Power BI Reports in Business Central

These Power BI reports are embedded in Business Central. You do have to download them from Microsoft App Source, but we’ll take a look at how to do that. There are a number of ways to access the reports. We’ll take a look at that as well. And also, we’ll take a look at specific reports and how you can use them to better understand your business and what’s going on on a day-to-day basis.

Accessing the Reports

First of all, let’s take a look at where the reports are in Business Central. A good way to see all the reports that have been added to the Business Central is to go to the All Reports area. In here, you’ll see all the reports in Business Central, and you can easily see that the Power BI reports have their own section in each area of Business Central.

Viewing and Bookmarking Reports

So let’s take a look at one of them. We can open this one here. The advantage of opening the reports this way from the menu is that you can also bookmark it. This one has been bookmarked. It will now show up on my role Center every time I enter Business Central.

Standard Report and Filters

So this is the standard report. It’s looking at my data in Business Central. It comes with a number of filters. These filters are one of the key attributes of Power BI that allows individual users to really get to the data that they’re looking for. For example, we can look at fiscal year. Let’s look at one fiscal year here. Select 2023. The whole report changes.

Benefits of Power BI

One of the big benefits of Power BI is that it pushes this data out to your users and makes it easy for them to get to the data that they want and do the analysis that they want. But I think the best way to look at the Power BI reports in Business Central is to scroll down the role center here until you get to the Power BI section. If I click on this, I can select report, and when I do that, I see all the reports that have been loaded into my Business Central instance. You can see all those here. I’ve got a number of different reports.

Inventory App and Related Reports

Let’s select the inventory app. So here’s one view of the Power BI report for inventory. But what I like to do is expand this and when I do that, I get other reports related to inventory. This is part of the standard embedded Power BI reports. I can click on the items that I want. You can see that here. I also have filters available, right? These are the filters we’ve looked at previously and they’re pretty much in every report. That’s now part of Business Central. We can open these up, change the way the report looks. I can also drill through and see additional information. You can see here, if I drill through, I’ve got all these options right here. I can see all the information about this particular item in inventory.

Item Ledger and Export Options

Let’s go to the item Ledger. You can see all the transactions in the item Ledger for this particular item. I can also export this to Excel if I want to. I can copy it, take a picture of this and use it any way that I want to. What’s really nice again about Power BI, is it gives the power to the user to get the information that they want to drill down and get even more detailed information if they want. So this is a real handy tool.

Downloading Reports from Appsource

So these new Power BI reports are part of Business Central, but you do have to download them from Appsource. So let’s see how you do that. It’s easy to do. We’ll click on Power BI, we’ll go to select reports. It brings up the screen that we’ve already seen. What I want to do is then go to this ellipse here, go to get reports, go to Services. When I do that, it jumps out to Microsoft Appsource. And what’s nice about this is that it’s just showing me Power BI reports for Business Central. You can see the products here. The product is Power BI and then I’ve got a filter. I’m looking at Dynamics 365 Business Central. So what I’m going to see down here are all those apps that meet that requirement.

Power BI Apps and Reports

Power BI uses the terms apps for their collection of reports. The reports can be numerous for an app, may include connection to the data and particular queries, and then also the filters that we looked at. So all you need to do is get it now and get this information. Let’s download one I’ve not done yet. Here’s one here. I’ll get it now. It’ll ask if you want to install this. I’m going to install it. These are all the apps that I’ve downloaded from Microsoft App Source related to Power BI. You can see those here. This is another way to look at them. We can open up the inventory reports here, the purchasing reports, let’s open that up. And this is another way to look at these Power BI reports. This is Power BI. You can see the URL up here and I have got the various reports here. So for example, purchased by item. I can see all that here.

Navigating Power BI

If you are not familiar with Power BI, it’s not only gives you all the detail information, but it’s easy way to navigate the information. For example, these are item categories down here in the lower right hand side. If I wanted to just look at desk items, I could click on that and the remaining parts of this dashboard are going to change reflect my selection here as desk. So you can see the desk items here. I can open up the detail. I see that one desk and I’ve got this heat map here as well. So this is an easy way to look at the data in Business Central and get more information, get more insight to what’s happening in your business.

Connecting Power BI to Business Central

When you download the various Power BI apps into Business Central, you’ll be prompted to fill out this information here. This is connecting Power BI reports to the Business Central data, provides some criteria about the filters. It’s looking at the queries. You can see that information here. If I open up the Finance Report, I have got information about which dates are going to be included in that report. And this is just the basic information. When I open up a specific report, I can still use the filters to get to the information that I want. This is easy to do when it’s all in Business Central. You do need a license for Power BI to download those reports and use them in Business Central.

Exploring Embedded Power BI Reports

So back to the All Reports menu, we can see that Microsoft has included a lot of embedded Power BI reports into Business Central. You can see just a sampling of them here. There are dozens and dozens of them. There’s a number of different ways to look at them, and they’re really easy to import into Business Central and get it set up with your data. And there’s a number of ways to look at this data. You can look at it in Business Central. You can click on these reports, save them as bookmarks, and you can also go to powerbi.com and look at your account there. The advantage there is you can also share that with others in your organization. You can share the links to the reports in Business Central as well on Teams and send the link to others with e-mail.

Conclusion

So if you’re not familiar with Power BI, this is a great way to get introduced to it. There’s a lot of reports out-of-the-box ready to go. Should really take a look at it. It’ll make your life a lot easier. I think you’ll enjoy the reporting experience, and what you want to do is push this functionality out to other users in your organization so they can take advantage of this data as well.