Power BI for Business Central: dashboards connected to your ERP

It's the set of tools and processes that turn your company's data into useful information for decision-making. In practice, it means moving from spreadsheets scattered across different departments to dashboards that show what's happening in your business in real time: how much you've sold today, which customers generate the most margin, how your stock is doing, or whether you'll hit this month's budget. Instead of waiting for someone to gather and cross-reference that data by hand — usually days or weeks after it happened — business intelligence automates that work and keeps it always up to date. It's not just about nice-looking charts: the goal is for you to get ahead of problems and spot opportunities before it's too late, relying on real data instead of gut feeling or whoever's been at the company longest.

It's Microsoft's data analysis and visualisation tool, designed to turn scattered information into clear, actionable reports. It lets you connect multiple data sources at once — your ERP, Excel sheets, SQL databases, web services — model them so they make sense together, and present them in interactive dashboards, accessible from the browser, mobile, or embedded directly in Microsoft Teams. Unlike a static PDF or Excel report, a Power BI dashboard updates itself and lets you explore the data with filters and different levels of detail: you can see total sales for the month and, with one click, drill down to the specific invoice that explains it. Being part of the Microsoft ecosystem, it integrates natively with Business Central, Excel and the rest of the tools your company already uses.

With Business Central natively — no need to export anything by hand — and with practically any other source you use today: Excel sheets, SQL databases, web services, cloud applications, other ERPs or CRMs, and hundreds of standard connectors for common marketing, sales or HR tools. This matters because in most companies data doesn't live in a single system: part is in the ERP, part in Excel, and part in separate applications nobody has connected to each other. Our job is precisely to unify all that scattered information into a single, reliable data model, resolving inconsistencies (different customer names, different date formats, duplicates) before they reach your reports, so that when you look at a dashboard you can trust the number you see without having to check it by hand.

Yes. We set up automatic refreshes at whatever frequency you need — several times a day, every night, or almost in real time, depending on the case — so your indicators are always up to date without anyone having to gather data or redo an Excel sheet every month. This removes one of the biggest friction points of traditional reporting: the time someone on your team spends every week exporting data from a system, pasting it into a spreadsheet, fixing broken formulas and laying out charts, only for that report to be out of date the moment it's produced. With Power BI that process is automated end to end: the data comes in on its own, gets transformed by the rules we've defined, and the dashboard reflects the real state of the business the moment you open it, not the last time someone had time to update an Excel sheet.

No. Power BI works independently and can connect to any data source, so you can have dashboards even if you don't use any Microsoft ERP. That said, if you work with Business Central, the integration is native: there's no need to set up custom connectors or export information, data flows straight from the ERP into your reports, and the project moves much faster because we already know Business Central's data structure in advance. This means that if you don't have Business Central today but are considering implementing it later, you can start with Power BI connected to your current systems and, when the time comes to make the jump to the ERP, transitioning your reports will be much simpler than if you'd built everything from scratch on another platform.

Yes, and that's what we recommend whenever possible. We train your team to explore and evolve their own reports: how to apply filters, create new views from the data already modelled, and make small visual tweaks without depending on us for every minor change. The goal is for Power BI to become just another everyday tool for you, not a black box only we understand. That said, we remain available for whatever you need later on: extending the data model with new sources, building more complex reports, or answering any technical question that comes up. Many clients opt for occasional or hourly support for these cases, rather than having to learn from scratch every time they want a report that goes beyond the usual.