If you run Business Central, start with Microsoft's own Power BI apps before building anything. There are nine of them (Finance, Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Inventory Valuation, Manufacturing, Projects, Subscription Billing and Sustainability), they install from Microsoft Marketplace, and the reports show up inside Business Central as well as in Power BI. The latest versions need Business Central 27.0 or later. Build your own reports with the Business Central connector in Power BI Desktop when you need something the apps don't do, like one P&L across several companies. Either way, every person who views the reports needs a Power BI Pro license and a paid Business Central license.

Option 1: Microsoft's Power BI apps

The apps are prebuilt semantic models and reports for each area of Business Central. The Finance app alone covers most of what a controller asks for in month one: a financial overview, income statement and balance sheet by month, budget vs actual, liquidity ratios, profitability, EBITDA, aged receivables and payables with back-dating, and detailed G/L, customer and vendor ledger reports sliced by dimension.

Three things make them worth trying first:

  • They're free. You pay for the Power BI licenses you'd need anyway, nothing extra for the apps.
  • They're embedded. Reports open from role centers inside Business Central, so people don't need to go hunting in Power BI.
  • You get the source. From version 26.2 (Finance, Inventory, Inventory Valuation, Manufacturing) and 27.0 (Purchasing, Projects, Sales), you can download the .pbix file from the installed app and use it as a starting point for your own changes.

What they need

  • Business Central online. The apps don't support on-premises Business Central.
  • Power BI Pro licenses for whoever installs the app, whoever refreshes it, and everyone who views the reports. A Fabric F64 or larger capacity removes the viewer requirement, but that's rarely worth it for a small business. Our post on Microsoft Fabric pricing walks through the math.
  • A paid Business Central license (Essentials, Premium or Team Member) for anyone viewing reports built on Business Central data.
  • G/L account categories set up for the Finance app. The KPIs and statements depend on them, so map your chart of accounts to the categories before you trust a single number.

Setting one up

  1. Open the app's install link from Microsoft's documentation (the Finance app is aka.ms/bc-pbi-finance-app) and sign in with your Power BI account.
  2. Select Get it now and follow the install steps.
  3. When it asks for credentials, choose OAuth2 and set the privacy level to Organizational.
  4. Pick a workspace. Microsoft recommends one workspace per app, which makes it easier to control who sees finance numbers versus sales numbers.
  5. In the Power BI service, open the semantic model's Settings, go to Parameters and enter your Environment and Company names. The company name is case sensitive, so check it first if the first refresh fails.
  6. Set a scheduled refresh. Pro gives you up to 8 a day.

Where they fall short

The apps work one company at a time. If you have three legal entities in Business Central, you install the app three times into three workspaces. That's fine for each entity's controller, but it doesn't give you a consolidated view.

They also follow Microsoft's idea of a standard report. If your management reporting groups accounts differently, uses a fiscal calendar that isn't a plain calendar, or needs data from outside Business Central (payroll, a CRM, a budget model in Excel), you'll outgrow them.

Option 2: Build your own with the connector

When the apps don't fit, connect Power BI Desktop directly:

  1. In Power BI Desktop, select Get Data, then Online Services, then Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Connect.
  2. Sign in with your Business Central account. You only do this once.
  3. In the Navigator, expand your environment and company. You'll see Standard APIs v2.0, Advanced APIs and Web services (legacy).

Use the Standard APIs v2.0 for master data and transactions. Microsoft discourages the legacy web services and recommends the APIs instead. By default the connector reads from a read-only copy of the database, so your reporting doesn't slow down people working in Business Central.

Business Central online is a cloud source, so you don't need an on-premises data gateway to refresh it. If someone tells you that you do, they're thinking of on-premises Business Central or another data source in the same model. Our post on gateway problems covers those.

Several companies in one report

The connector reads one company at a time too. To consolidate, pull the same tables from each company in Power Query, add a column with the company name, and append them into one table. Then build a company dimension so you can slice by entity or see the total. If the companies have different charts of accounts, you'll need a mapping table that lines them up, which is the part that takes real accounting judgment rather than Power BI skill.

Financial reports that tie out

Accountants will check your P&L against Business Central before they believe it. A few things that save you from that conversation going badly:

  • Flip the signs on purpose. In the general ledger, revenue and liabilities are credits and come through as negative amounts. Decide where you flip them (usually in a measure or a sign column on the account mapping) and do it in one place only.
  • Build a proper date table with your fiscal year and periods, and mark it as the date table. Don't rely on Power BI's automatic dates for financial reporting.
  • Report from G/L entries, not from subledgers, when the question is "what's the number on the P&L." Subledgers are for detail and aging.
  • Reconcile to the trial balance in Business Central for at least two closed months before anyone outside finance sees the report.

If different people should see different companies, departments or dimension values, set that up with row-level security instead of making copies of the report.

Which one to use

Install the apps first, especially Finance. They take an afternoon, they're free, and for a single-company business they may be all you need. If you hit their limits, download the .pbix source and change it, or build your own model with the connector. Many businesses end up with both: Microsoft's apps for day-to-day operational reports, and one custom model for management reporting and consolidation.

If you're on Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations rather than Business Central, this doesn't apply. F&O is a different product with different ways of getting data out to Power BI.

When to call someone

The setup is the easy part. The hard part is a chart of accounts mapping that finance agrees with, consolidation across entities, and numbers that tie out to the penny. Our background is in Microsoft Dynamics ERP, so we know where Business Central's numbers come from and why a report can be off by exactly one account.

Power BI Advisory covers Business Central reporting projects, from setting up the apps to building a consolidated financial model. If a Business Central report is broken or won't refresh today, our $299 Power BI fix covers it. If refresh is the problem, start with Power BI scheduled refresh failed and data source credential errors.

Sources: Microsoft Learn, Install Power BI apps for Business Central, Power BI apps by functional area, Power BI apps FAQ, Finance Power BI app, Build Power BI reports to display Business Central data.