What's New: Enhanced Financial Reporting (2026 release wave 1)

Overview

This 22-minute What’s New session covers enhancements to financial reporting in Business Central, aimed at controllers and the finance department. It starts with a tile view that replaces the list of reports for all users, then moves to features for report authors: categories, lifecycle status and company-level defaults.

It then shows dimension perspectives for running a report across dimension values, report scheduling with delivery by inbox or email, and an audit log for administrators that can be opened in analysis mode. The video ends with documentation and learning resources, including aka.ms/bcfinanceanalytics, and partner resources.

Key points

• Tile view is opened by switching from list to tiles. It shows each report’s category, name, code, status, last run time and internal description. Fields are blank when there is no data or description. List views can still be added.
• Reports can be placed in shipped categories (the presenter says about 10, from assets and liabilities to profitability and revenue analysis) or in custom categories. Categories are mainly for navigation.
• Report, row and column definitions have a lifecycle status. The shipped states are active, draft and retired, and authors can define their own. In the sample setup, draft and retired are blocked, meaning not ready to use. Blocked definitions show a notification and different styling.
• General Ledger Setup holds company defaults for view by, negative number format, company logo position and status. Report definitions set to default inherit them, and individual reports can override them.
• Dimension perspectives are defined once and reused. They can be simple (one run per dimension value), custom (selected values) or cross-dimensional (combinations across dimensions). Output is merged into one PDF or into one Excel worksheet per value. The perspective can be overridden on the request page.
• Report schedules support Excel and PDF output, delivery to the report inbox and email, a recurrence formula (such as weekly), recipients and custom filters for request page values. Schedule logs show what ran and link to the report inbox or sent emails.
• The audit log, for all reports or for a single report, shows who ran which report, when and in which format. It has filters for the last 30 days, year to date and custom ranges, and can be opened in analysis mode for usage reports.

Features

Every feature below: status not stated, demoed.

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.

• page 118 “General Ledger Setup” at 6:22

Quotes

• 0:17 “If we allow controllers and the finance department to have to work better with financial reporting, we are actually helping every single customer Business”
• 3:24 “The types of categories are where we ship, I think, 10 different types of categories from assets and liabilities all the way down to”
• 4:30 “The most important thing here is that you can define whether a report’s in a given state and this is actually not only reports,”
• 4:46 “we say the active state is the only one that is not blocked, both draft and retired state of definitions are considered blocked”
• 6:53 “If you do it like this, then you control the negative if all your report definition use the default here, then you control that”
• 9:18 “You have 15 pages, but over here when you look at the page, it’s page one of three. So how come there’s 15 pages”
• 10:18 “Basically we get the report run by each value of the this dimension and then merged together in one PDF. This also works for”
• 10:47 “one worksheet for each value of the dimension administration, production, purchasing, and sales.”
• 13:09 “I can set the recurrence formula here weekly. I can even set recipients”
• 13:33 “the request page values for this particular invocation so in case you have special way like you i”
• 14:26 “The audit log is let’s go back to the tile here. Um and you can get the audit log either in context of a”
• 14:59 “We also created filters on this page so you can you can um easily dive into all logs last 30 days and year to”
• 15:42 “If you want to learn more about this and other things related to financial analytics aka.ms/bcfinanceanalytics is the overview page”
• 16:16 “If it’s too much maybe you can use the summarize feature in Microsoft Learn and simply get a summary of each”

Presenters (as heard): Eddie, Mike, Lucas.