Jet Analytics vs Jet Reports: which do you need?

Jet Reports is the Excel tool. Jet Analytics is the data platform underneath. How to tell which one your Dynamics reporting problem actually needs.

The short answer

Jet Reports is an Excel reporting tool that reads straight from Business Central. Jet Analytics is a data warehouse and governed data model that sits underneath Excel and Power BI. If you have one Business Central company and the reporting problem is "finance wants its numbers in Excel without exporting", Jet Reports is the answer. If the problem is several companies, history from an old system, dimension analysis beyond the two global dimensions, or Power BI across the business, Jet Analytics is the answer, and Jet Reports often stays on top of it. Hopton is a Jet Analytics partner for the UK and Ireland.

Why people confuse them

Both carry the Jet name, both come from insightsoftware, both are sold to Dynamics customers, and both show up in Excel. The June 2026 renaming of the Business Central extension to "insightsoftware Reporting for Business Central" has not helped. The useful distinction is the layer each works at. Jet Reports is the presentation layer: a ribbon in Excel that queries data and lays it out. Jet Analytics is the data layer: a warehouse that holds a reshaped, governed copy of the ERP data for anything to report from.

What Jet Reports does

Jet Reports adds functions and a report designer to Excel. A finance user picks tables and fields from Business Central, NAV or GP, sets filters, and refreshes the sheet to pull the latest figures. Reports can be scheduled and shared through Jet Hub, insightsoftware's web portal. The strength is familiarity: finance already lives in Excel, and the reports update themselves instead of being rebuilt from an export every month.

The limits are the limits of reading from a transactional database. Each refresh queries the live tables, so large multi-company reports get slow. Logic lives in the spreadsheet, so two analysts can define gross margin two ways. And when the business migrates from NAV to Business Central, the reports point at a new schema and the old history is somewhere else.

What Jet Analytics does

Jet Analytics takes the data out of the ERP on a schedule, reshapes it into a star-schema warehouse with pre-built data models for sales, finance, purchasing, inventory and so on, and publishes it for Excel, Jet Reports and Power BI to read. The definitions live once, in the model. Several companies and several currencies sit in one structure. History from a retired system can be loaded beside the current one, so trend reporting survives a migration. We cover why Power BI wants a star schema elsewhere; Jet Analytics builds you one.

There are now two flavours. Jet Analytics Classic runs on SQL Server in your own environment, managed through the Jet Data Manager. The new cloud-managed Jet Analytics, launched with TimeXtender in June 2026, lands the same kind of governed model in Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake or Snowflake. What is the new Jet Analytics covers the differences.

Which one you need

Start from the symptom, not the product. If month end is slow because finance rebuilds the pack from exports, and you run one company, Jet Reports fixes that on its own. If the symptom is two people arriving at different numbers for the same measure, that is a definitions problem and it needs a data model, which is Jet Analytics. If the symptom is "we have four companies and the group view is a spreadsheet of spreadsheets", that is a consolidation problem, Jet Analytics again. If the symptom is "we want Power BI dashboards for the board", Jet Reports is not the tool at all; Power BI needs a model to read from, and Jet Analytics provides one.

When you need both

Most organisations that outgrow Jet Reports do not throw it away. Jet Reports can read from the Jet Analytics warehouse instead of the live ERP. The spreadsheets finance already trusts get faster, pick up the governed definitions, and stop breaking when the ERP changes. Power BI reads the same model for everything that is better as a dashboard. That combination, Excel for the detailed pack and Power BI for the overview, on one set of numbers, is the end state most finance teams actually want.

How this compares with the other routes

Jet is one of three routes to Business Central reporting. Microsoft's own Power BI apps are free and single-company. A ready-made tool such as Cosmos gives you a structured Business Central model with nothing to build or run. A Fabric platform you build yourself gives maximum control at maximum effort. Jet Analytics sits between Cosmos and the hand-built platform: a governed warehouse you own, with Jet Reports as the Excel layer if you want it. We partner on Jet and Cosmos and we build on Fabric, so we recommend by fit rather than by product; the reasoning is in the Jet vs Cosmos decision.

Working with Hopton

We implement Jet Analytics, train your team and support it after go-live, and we are extending our insightsoftware partnership to Jet Reports. The usual starting point is a free audit of how your teams report from Dynamics today, which settles which layer the problem sits in before anyone buys a licence. Details on our Jet Analytics partner page, or get in touch.

Jet Analytics vs Jet Reports: which do you need, and when do you need both?