What's New: Power BI for Projects and Inventory (2025 release wave 2)
Power BI updates for Business Central inventory and projects in 2025 release wave 2: a new Inventory Forecasting report using statistical machine learning with seasonality settings, and an open source Project Power BI app with more focus on project profitability, shown with demos of sales by type and by customer.
- Introduction to Power BI Updates
- Inventory Forecasting Report Demo
- Advanced Forecasting Parameters and Seasonality
- Project Profitability and Sales by Type
- Project Sales Analysis by Customer
- Resources and Community Links
Overview
The video covers what is new in Power BI reporting for inventory and projects. The main addition is an Inventory Forecasting report that forecasts inventory needs from past performance using statistical machine learning models. It shows upper and lower bounds and trend lines, and can be filtered by location, item, or item ledger entry type. The demo shows how to change the look-ahead window, upper bounds and seasonality in the forecast visual menu.
For projects, the Project Power BI app is now open source and can be customized. The reports put more focus on project profitability, with billable to invoice percentage and profitability measures. The video demos Project Invoice Sales by Type and Project Invoice Sales by Customer, and points to the aka.ms landing pages for inventory and project analytics.
Key points
- The Inventory Forecasting report forecasts inventory needs from past performance using statistical machine learning models, not generative AI.
- The forecast shows upper and lower bounds and trend lines, and can be filtered by location, item, or item ledger entry type.
- Look-ahead window, upper bounds and seasonality are changed in the forecast visual menu; seasonality can be set to one, two or three seasons depending on the business.
- Forecast quality depends on historical data and on tuning parameters to the business type.
- The Project Power BI app is now open source and ready for customization.
- Project reports add billable to invoice percentage and profitability measures, broken down by sales type (resources, items, GL accounts) and by customer.
- Landing pages for scenarios, personas and reports: aka.ms/bcinventoryanalytics and aka.ms/bcprojectanalytics.
Features
| Feature | Status | At |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory Forecasting Report | status not stated, demoed | 0:17 |
| Seasonality Control in Forecasting | status not stated, demoed | 4:41 |
| Project Power BI App Open Source | status not stated | 1:03 |
| Project Profitability Analysis | status not stated, demoed | 1:17 |
| Project Invoice Sales by Type | status not stated, demoed | 6:17 |
| Project Invoice Sales by Customer | status not stated, demoed | 7:22 |
| Project and Inventory Analytics Landing Pages | status not stated | 8:19 |
AL objects mentioned
As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.
- other “Inventory Forecasting” at 1:34
- other “Project Invoice Sales by Type” at 6:37
- other “Project Invoice Sales by Customer” at 7:52
Quotes
- 0:17 “The main news is that you can now forecast your inventory needs based on past performance.”
- 1:03 “And if you use the project module, uh do check the updated PowerBI app as well. This is uh now open source and um”
- 1:17 “one thing we added to the actual reports there is a little bit more focus on profitability of your projects.”
- 4:41 “the way you can control the like the window look ahead window upper bounds and seasonality is um simply to go and modify this”
- 5:33 “the seasonality here can be uh like uh one or two or three seasons depending on if you are if you sell Christmas decorations”