Self-assessment
Business Central reporting assessment
Business Central reporting has three layers: the built-in reports with your own layouts, Power BI reading the APIs, and a lakehouse for history and other systems. Answer ten questions about how reporting works today, and you get the layer that fits, the gaps to close first, and where to read about each.
10 questions · about three minutes · your answers stay in this browser tab
The results
What each result means
0% to 45%
Start with what Business Central already has
Most of the pain is the hand-fixed export, and the cheapest fix is inside Business Central: Excel layouts on the reports finance already runs, and a short list of who owns each one.
45% to 70%
Ready for Power BI on the APIs
The basics are there. The next step is Power BI reading API pages incrementally, under its own account, with one definition per metric.
70% to 90%
Ready for a lakehouse
Reporting is disciplined, and the limits now are other systems and history. That is where a lakehouse earns its cost: each source lands once, gets reconciled once, and every dashboard reads the same gold tables.
90% and above
Ready for agents on governed data
Reporting is mature. The next step is letting people ask questions in plain English, through the Business Central MCP server for live questions and Genie on the lakehouse for history.
FAQ
About this assessment
Which Business Central reporting layer do I need?
Built-in reports with Excel or Word layouts cover most month-end packs. Power BI on the API pages fits dashboards across modules. A lakehouse earns its cost when reports join several systems or need years of history. The assessment points to the layer your answers describe.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. The scoring runs in your browser and nothing is stored or sent. Close the tab and the answers are gone.
Should Power BI use OData web services or the APIs?
Use API pages and API queries. They are versioned contracts built for integration, while pages published as web services change whenever someone changes the page they come from.
Can Business Central data go into Databricks?
Yes, by one of two routes: a Databricks job that reads the Business Central APIs incrementally, or the bc2adls extension, which exports tables to Azure Data Lake Storage or Microsoft Fabric for Databricks to read. There is no managed Databricks connector for Business Central.