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Dashboards finance teams ask for first
P&L by dimension
Revenue, gross margin and expenses by department, location or product line, month and year to date, against last year.
Balance sheet trend
Month-end balances over time, so working capital movements are visible at a glance.
Cash position
Bank balances by account and currency, plus expected receipts and payments from open customer and vendor entries.
Receivables aging
Overdue balances by customer and bucket, with drill-through to open invoices and the collector responsible.
Payables due
What must be paid this week and next, and which early payment discounts are about to lapse.
Budget against actual
G/L budgets from Business Central, or a forecast loaded from Excel, compared with posted actuals by account and dimension.
Standard Finance app or a custom model?
Getting the data model right
Power BI reads Business Central through its connector, which uses the standard API pages or custom API pages we publish. For finance reporting the heart of the model is G/L entries, joined to accounts, dimensions, a date table and, for groups, the company. Getting that star shape right matters more than any visual.
Two details catch people out. First, the date table must follow your fiscal year and accounting periods, not the calendar, or year-to-date figures will be wrong for anyone whose year does not start in January. Second, account categories and subcategories in Business Central decide how the standard app groups the P&L and balance sheet, so they need to be tidy before the reports are.
Sharing a report with colleagues needs the right Power BI licences for each viewer or a capacity that covers them. We point this out early so it does not surprise anyone at rollout.
From ledger to the board pack
- 1
Collect the current pack
We start from the spreadsheets and PDFs your owners and lenders already read, and list every figure on them.
- 2
Reconcile before designing
Each key number is tied back to a Business Central financial report so there is one agreed answer before a chart is drawn.
- 3
Build the model
The Finance app is installed or a custom model is built, with fiscal calendar, dimensions and security by company or department.
- 4
Design for the meeting
Pages are laid out in the order the monthly review runs, with drill-through for the questions people always ask.
- 5
Schedule and hand over
Refresh schedules, workspace access and a short guide for finance to add measures themselves are set up at the end.
Why finance stops trusting a dashboard
- ✓The totals do not match the trial balance, and nobody can explain the difference.
- ✓Refresh fails quietly and the report shows last week's numbers with no warning.
- ✓Signs are flipped inconsistently, so revenue shows negative on one page and positive on another.
- ✓Dimension values were renamed in Business Central but the report still groups by the old names.
- ✓Too many pages, so the one number the owner wants is three clicks away.
Power BI and Business Central finance questions
Should we start with Microsoft's Finance app or build our own?
Start with the Finance app if your chart of accounts uses Business Central's account categories sensibly and you report one company at a time. It is quick to switch on and Microsoft maintains it. Build a custom model when you need your own reporting hierarchy, consolidation across entities or data from outside Business Central.
How current is the data in the dashboards?
Power BI imports data on a refresh schedule, so dashboards show figures as of the last refresh. How many refreshes a day you can schedule depends on your Power BI licence or capacity. For month-end reporting a nightly refresh is normally enough; operational cash views may need more.
Can the dashboards be seen inside Business Central?
Yes. Power BI reports can be embedded as parts on role centers and on some list pages, so a controller sees key figures on their home page. Users still need access to the report in Power BI for it to display.
Can we report budgets that live in Excel?
Yes. Budgets can be imported into Business Central G/L budgets, which keeps them next to actuals, or loaded into the Power BI model from a controlled Excel file. We usually recommend the first so budget and actual share accounts and dimensions.
Will this replace financial reports inside Business Central?
Not entirely. Financial reports in Business Central remain the formal source for statements and are what auditors expect to see. Power BI adds trend, drill-through and visual views on top, and blends in data Business Central does not hold.
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