What's New: Financial Analytics (2025 release wave 2)
Financial analytics changes in Business Central 2025 release wave 2: financial reporting (dynamic date headers, additional reporting currency columns, row definition editing), new Power BI late payment and collection period reports, deferral analysis with Word/Excel layouts, new deferral lines pages, and finance report documentation.
- Introduction and business priorities
- Four investment areas overview
- Financial reporting improvements
- PowerBI for finance and cash flow analytics
- Deferrals analysis and report layout modernization
- New deferral line pages and finance documentation
- Finance reporting documentation and analytics landing page
- Resources and community engagement
Overview
The video, published 2025-10-01 by the Business Central channel, walks through four investment areas in financial analytics for the 2025 release wave 2. It demos changes to financial reporting, Power BI reports for receivables and cash flow, and deferral reporting.
It also covers modernized deferral report layouts, three new deferral lines pages, and new documentation for finance reports. The presenter notes that RDLC layouts are the ones that will be deprecated, and that documentation for several finance reports had not been written before.
Key points
- Financial reports can show actual dates in column headers via the option ‘include date in column header’. When text and date are both shown, the date appears in parentheses.
- Column definitions have a new ‘show in ACY’ field, so reports can show local currency and additional reporting currency in separate columns. An additional currency must be set up for values to appear.
- Row and column definition descriptions can now be changed directly from the card, and row definitions can be edited in Excel. Adding a single GL account auto-completes the row description from the account name. Renaming a GL account triggers a notification to check financial reports that use it.
- A new Power BI late payment analysis report for receivables uses a bubble chart. Customers with large late amounts and high average days late appear in the upper right. The average collection period report now includes a historical trend.
- Deferral analysis now covers upcoming (non-posted) deferrals as well as posted ones, for sales, purchase and GL. Previously only posted deferrals could be analyzed.
- Deferral reports support Word and Excel layouts in addition to RDLC, and a default layout can be set that the request page respects. RDLC will be deprecated. The Excel layouts allow analysis across all deferrals.
- New pages Deferral Lines for Sales, Purchase and GL show deferral lines across unposted documents. Documentation now covers VAT, cost accounting, deferrals, consolidations and intercompany reports, with teaching tips in the client.
Features
| Feature | Status | At |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamic date headers in financial reporting | status not stated, demoed | 2:46 |
| Additional reporting currency support in financial reports | status not stated, demoed | 5:52 |
| Improved row definition editing in financial reporting | status not stated, demoed | 7:02 |
| GL account name change notifications in financial reporting | status not stated, demoed | 8:22 |
| Show less/show more improvements in financial reporting | status not stated, demoed | 3:54 |
| Late payment analysis report for receivables | status not stated, demoed | 9:34 |
| Historical average collection period trend in PowerBI | status not stated, demoed | 12:35 |
| Deferral analysis for posted and upcoming deferrals | status not stated, demoed | 13:30 |
| Word and Excel layouts for deferral reports | status not stated, demoed | 13:55 |
| In-client documentation for deferrals reporting | status not stated, demoed | 14:08 |
| Excel layout analysis across deferrals | status not stated, demoed | 15:34 |
| New deferral lines pages | status not stated | 16:08 |
| Comprehensive finance reports documentation | status not stated | 16:50 |
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 “Collection Period Report” at 13:11
- report “Deferral Summary” at 14:18
- page “Deferral Lines for Sales” at 16:08
- page “Deferral Lines for Purchase” at 16:08
- page “Deferral Lines for GL” at 16:08
Not found in BC28-30: report “Collection Period Report”, report “Deferral Summary”, page “Deferral Lines for Sales”, page “Deferral Lines for Purchase”, page “Deferral Lines for GL”.
Quotes
- 0:28 “profitability and process efficiency those were both in the top five”
- 1:12 “this is used for by more than a third of all customers uh use this”
- 4:40 “we have a new option here called include date in column header”
- 6:02 “there’s a new column here called show in uh ACY in additional reporting currency”
- 9:51 “a completely new report late payment analysis on receivables”
- 13:41 “you now have the ability to analyze upcoming which means non-posted and existing deferrals, deferrals that are posted”
- 13:55 “We also modernized the report layouts so that they now use Word or Excel”
- 14:29 “RDLC is the one that will be deprecated of these layouts”
- 16:08 “Um as a new feature, we also added three new pages, deferral lines for sales, purchase and GL”
- 16:50 “we added both learn content and these incline teaching tips for all of that”
- 17:26 “we as Microsoft forgot or uh forgot or didn’t have time to document this”