ERP reporting that finance and operations both read

Start with what Business Central already does

A surprising share of ERP reporting requests are already answered inside Business Central, and the first week of an engagement is finding out which. Users can add Word and Excel layouts to any report from the Report Layouts page without a developer, and Excel layouts have been there since the 2022 release wave 1.

Analysis mode, generally available since October 2023, lets anyone group, pivot and total a list page in the client. Financial Reporting, the feature that replaced account schedules in 2022, builds the P&L and balance sheet views finance actually signs.

Microsoft also publishes nine Power BI apps for Business Central, from Finance and Sales to Manufacturing and Projects, generally available since November 2024 and open source since 2025.

• Word and Excel layouts edited on the Report Layouts page, no extension needed
• Analysis mode for ad hoc pivots, with its limits known: no hierarchical lists, calendar-year date grouping
• Financial Reporting row and column definitions for the statements finance owns
• Microsoft's Power BI apps, which need a Power BI Pro licence or capacity to use

Power BI on the ERP record

When the built-in reports run out, the next step is one semantic model on the ERP rather than forty reports each reading it their own way. Power BI reads Business Central through API pages and queries, and since February 2022 those reads go to a read-only replica, so a heavy refresh doesn't slow the people posting.

The limits are worth designing around rather than discovering. Business Central online allows each user five concurrent OData requests and 6,000 in any five-minute window, and a request that runs past eight minutes times out. Refresh runs under a dedicated account, incrementally where the table carries a modified date, and on a schedule tied to the posting cycle.

• API pages and queries rather than published web service pages, which Microsoft no longer recommends
• Measures for margin, aged debt and inventory turns reconciled to the trial balance before a visual exists
• Incremental refresh on modified dates, so a nightly load doesn't hit the 429 limit
• Row-level security by company, location or sales territory

ERP data beside plant, lab and warehouse data

Power BI on Business Central is enough while every number lives in the ERP. It stops being enough when a question needs the line historian, the lab, the scale house, a warehouse system or market prices, because those were never going to live in the ERP.

That's where a lakehouse earns its place. Databricks has no managed Business Central connector, since the Lakeflow Connect Dynamics 365 connector covers the Dataverse applications and Finance & Operations rather than Business Central.

So the ERP lands either from the API with incremental reads or through bc2adls, which exports Business Central tables to Azure Data Lake Storage or Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft archived its own copy in 2023, and the community fork is the one still released.

• Bronze landed with lineage on every row, silver reconciling units, supplier names and companies
• Gold tables with one definition per metric, read by every dashboard and every Genie question
• Unity Catalog governing who sees which company and which plant
• Business Central stays the system of record and nothing writes back to it from the lakehouse

Dashboards operations will open

The plant leadership study at /case-studies/plant-leadership-reporting-databricks shows what this looks like for a manufacturer in its first year.

Seven sources, Business Central among them, land in 37 tables behind nine AI/BI dashboards: ramp-up against nameplate, yard backlog in days, downtime by cause, a supplier scorecard, a mass balance, and receiving exceptions that match every Business Central receipt to its scale ticket.

It was built on sample data before any live system was connected, so leadership could argue with the reports before handing over access, and the screenshots are on that page.

• Receipts in the ERP matched against weighbridge or scanner data, with the variance flagged
• Production orders valued at the day's price and their own assay, so price and grade effects separate
• Supplier scorecards on delivery against contract, rejected loads and yield
• Alerts when a metric moves, sent to the person who owns it

Plain-English questions on the same numbers

A dashboard answers the question everybody asks every Monday. Genie answers the one somebody thought of in the meeting, from the same governed gold tables, and shows the SQL it ran so the number can be checked.

Building the two on separate definitions is how a company ends up with two answers and an argument, so the metric is defined once and both read it. The Genie side of the work is at /services/ai-bi-genie.

• A Genie space scoped to the gold tables, with sample questions that have known answers
• Instructions that carry the business vocabulary, so 'received' means what the yard means by it
• The generated SQL visible on every answer

Reporting off an ERP you're leaving

The reporting often outlives the ERP it was built on. Dynamics NAV support ends in January 2028, and plenty of estates still report off SAP, Oracle or an Epicor install somebody wants to retire.

We move the history into the lakehouse first, so the reports keep working while the cutover happens underneath them, and the new ERP lands into the same gold tables when it goes live.

• History moved before cutover, so year-on-year comparisons survive the migration
• Old and new ERP mapped to one set of definitions in the gold layer
• A parallel run where both feeds produce the same number before the old one is switched off