What’s New: Financial Reporting (for Report Users) (2025 release wave 1)
Financial reporting changes for report users in 2025 release wave 1 of Business Central: slimmer interface, internal description for audit, accounting format for negative numbers, portrait PDF export, and Excel layouts with a default layout option. All were demoed.
- Introduction to financial reporting updates
- Slimmer user interface and internal descriptions
- Display title and report layout improvements
- Negative number formatting options
- Portrait mode for PDF export
- Excel layouts feature
Overview
This 8-minute video from the Business Central channel (published 2025-04-01) walks through what is new in financial reporting for people who run and read financial reports. It uses the income statement report to show each change.
The changes covered are a more compact title area, a separate internal description next to the display title, an accounting format for negative numbers, portrait mode for PDF export, and Excel layouts that can be saved, reused and set as the default for export.
Key points
- The financial reporting interface is slimmer. The display title takes less room, which leaves more space on screen, and you can use personalization to hide the row number.
- Reports show an internal description, which the presenter says is used for audit purposes. The old description field is now called display title and is used when viewing the report and in PDF export.
- Report authors can add an introductory paragraph and a closing paragraph. These show in view mode and in the PDF.
- A new negative amount format option shows negative numbers in parentheses (accounting format) instead of with a minus sign. It applies in view mode and when printing or exporting.
- PDF output can now use portrait mode. Before, it was always landscape.
- Excel layouts are set up from Definitions > Excel layouts. You enter a code, a description and a file name, then export a template, build the report in Excel (in the demo, on a separate sheet with the data tab hidden) and import it back.
- You can keep several Excel layouts per report and run any of them directly. The layouts are stored in Business Central and shared between users of the report.
Features
Every feature below: status not stated, demoed.
| Feature | At |
|---|---|
| Internal description for audit purposes | 0:45 |
| Slimmer user interface | 1:14 |
| Negative amount format option | 2:25 |
| Portrait mode for PDF export | 3:07 |
| Excel layouts | 3:40 |
| Default Excel layout | 7:14 |
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 “income statement” at 0:45
More than one object has this name, so none is linked: report “income statement”.
Quotes
- 0:06 “Welcome to the 2025 release wave 1. What’s new in financial reporting?”
- 0:19 “slimmer user interface, accounting format for negative numbers, portrait mode for PDF, and finally uh Excel layouts”
- 0:45 “This is the thing we use for audit purposes. And the prior uh version had a description here.”
- 3:07 “It’s been like that forever in in this feature. As a new thing, we also added portrait um mode.”
- 3:40 “There’s a new thing here in this wave. We added something we call Excel layouts.”
- 7:14 “I might want to pick one of these as my default layout. So that’s what this default Excel layout is for.”
- 7:38 “I can just have my Excel layout um present in business central and I can share this between the users of the report.”