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Business Intelligence Quick Start

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Being able to collect and analyze the ever-increasing amounts of data in an actionable way is an invaluable part of doing business these days. Business Central offers many business intelligence (BI) tools—both built-in and integrated with other services—to help your company in the decision-making process.

Get insights on your key points of interest

Business Central includes built-in charts that can be displayed in the Insights part on your home page, covering income & expense, cash flow, sales trends and other reports. You can find additional key performance indicators (KPIs) on the Intelligent Cloud Insights page, which displays actionable information from finance, inventory, sales, and procurement:

  • Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature 1. icon, enter Intelligent Cloud Insights, then choose the related link.

The available data cards and insights can be selected to open the related ledger page. The Intelligent Cloud Insights page also uses a connection with existing Power BI and Azure Machine Learning subscriptions to display analysis and forecast dashboards.

Set up Power BI integration

You can connect Business Central with Power BI to create penetrating reports and powerful dashboards. Power BI integration provides many options to give insights based on your business' data, including a wide range of visual, filtering, and display customizations.

  1. On your home page, choose the Get started with Power BI link.
  2. Choose Next.
  3. Choose the Go to Power BI home page action, sign in with your Power BI account, or start a trial using your work email address.
  4. Back on the Set Up Power BI Reports page, choose Next.
  5. On the next screen, choose Next to upload a demonstration report to Power BI, then choose Finish.

The report upload takes a few minutes, but you can resume working on Business Central during the transfer. After the upload, you can choose the Select reports action in the Power BI Reports part on your home page to display the available dashboards.

The Power BI integration with Business Central includes a sample dashboard for the Cronus demonstration company. More ready-to-use dashboards and dataset connectors can be easily installed by browsing the Apps section in the Power BI website. There you'll see available apps for Business Central that integrate and display data from finance, sales, and other areas. Learn more about the Power BI features in this Business Central and Power BI article, and see how to create your own dashboards at Get started creating in the Power BI service.

You can also create visual reports based on Business Central by using the Microsoft Excel Document (data only) file type option on report request pages. Learn more at Run and Print Reports.

See also

Business Analysis and Financial Reporting
Business Central Quick Starts
Work with Power BI Reports in Business Central

Find free e-learning modules for Business Central here