What's New: Power BI Reporting for Business Central - New Apps (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video presents the new Power BI reports for Business Central that are embedded in the application and reachable through role centers and role explorer. It demos the Finance reports (financial KPIs, balance sheet drill-through) and the Sales Overview reports, then walks through the setup wizard, which covers calendar type, date range, holidays, and mapping Power BI workspaces to companies.

It then covers the roadmap: more demo data in an upcoming minor release, new apps for subscription billing, sustainability and fixed assets, and open-sourcing of the report files from release 26 in April.

Key points

• 76 Power BI reports are embedded in Business Central and can be opened from role centers and role explorer.
• Setup needs a Power BI workspace connection and picking the right apps; the assisted setup wizard covers calendar type, date range, holidays and workspace-to-company mapping.
• Apps are currently per company, so each company needs its own setup. You can start with one app, add more later, and revisit the setup.
• Finance financial KPIs need account categories mapped correctly during configuration.
• Inventory reporting needs two separate apps for complete coverage.
• Planned: more demo data in a coming minor release (financial, project, fixed assets first), plus new apps for subscription billing, sustainability and fixed assets.
• Announced: the .pbix report files will be open source on GitHub from release 26 (April), so reports can be customized and data sources added.

Features

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.

• report “Balance Sheet” at 4:14
• report “Financial Overview” at 5:50
• report “Sales Overview” at 6:43

Not found in BC28-30: report “Financial Overview”, report “Sales Overview”.

More than one object has this name, so none is linked: report “Balance Sheet”.

Quotes

• 0:19 “in this release uh in the next minor uh first you will see that we have new powerbi reports enabling uh reporting on your”
• 0:40 “but we also embedded those reports in within business Central so that you can access them directly from within business Central it requires a”
• 2:01 “there’s um a a piece of uh setup that you need to do you need to pick the right uh apps for the right”
• 7:23 “currently the apps are per company uh so if I want to run powerbi on multiple um business Central companies I can either create”
• 13:03 “in one of the coming releases minor releases hopefully the second one we will add demo data so that um when you run on”
• 13:44 “we will extend the set of apps we have the seven apps we have with an app for subscription billing”
• 14:18 “from the next release which means uh release 26 which is April uh we will open source the report files like the the powerbi”

Disclaimers in the video

• 1:00 coming-later: later on in one of the next miners uh we will provide more demo data so it’s easier to demonstrate all the capabilities that powerbi is offering
• 1:41 coming-later: later on you’ll be able to select specific visuals
• 13:03 coming-later: in one of the coming releases minor releases hopefully the second one we will add demo data
• 13:44 coming-later: we will extend the set of apps we have the seven apps we have with an app for subscription billing so that will powerbi will be embedded as reporting there too and we will also get one for sustainability we’ll get one for fixed assets
• 14:18 coming-later: from the next release which means uh release 26 which is April uh we will open source the report files
• 14:18 subject-to-change: in this release because we’re still making a few changes um to the uh apps we um we keep it to ourselves

Presenters (as heard): Brian Nelson.