Power BI apps for Business Central: what you get

Nine free apps, 116 reports, one workspace per company. Microsoft Power BI apps for Business Central are a good first step. Here is where they stop.

What Microsoft gives you

Since the 2024 release wave 2, Business Central has shipped with a set of Power BI apps built by Microsoft and installed from the marketplace. There are nine of them: Finance, Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Inventory Valuation, Projects, Manufacturing, Sustainability and Subscription Billing. Between them they hold 116 reports, from an income statement and aged receivables through daily sales and customer retention to work centre load and production scrap. Each report carries an Open in Business Central link back to the page it was built from.

For a business that has just gone live on Business Central and wants finance and sales reporting next week rather than next quarter, this is the right first step, and we say so to clients. The apps are maintained by Microsoft, they follow the standard data model, and from version 26.2 for most apps (27.0 for Sales, Purchasing and Projects) you can download the source files and change them. Our Business Central analytics page sets out where they sit in the wider picture; this post is about what you get, the limits that catch people, and the point at which you need something more.

What it costs

The apps are free. The licences are not. Everyone who installs, refreshes or reads a report needs a Power BI Pro licence, or the reports need to sit on a Fabric or Premium capacity. The free Power BI licence does not work, because the apps have to live in a shared workspace. Readers also need a paid Business Central licence (Essentials, Premium or Team Member). For a twenty-person finance and sales team, that is twenty Pro licences before anyone has built anything, which is usually fine and occasionally a surprise. Our Fabric licensing calculator includes the Pro and capacity comparison.

The three limits that catch people

One company per workspace. The apps work per company. If you run four Business Central companies, you install the app four times into four workspaces, and you get four income statements rather than one consolidated view. For a group that is the first thing finance asks for and the first thing the apps cannot do. Our post on consolidating multiple Business Central companies in one model covers the proper answer. Microsoft has said the apps are being rebuilt for Fabric with multi-company versions, so this will improve, but that depends on the forthcoming Business Central mirroring preview rather than anything you can install today.

Dimensions need a job. The reports do not read the standard dimension set entries. They read a flattened table that a job queue entry keeps up to date, created when you run the Connect to Power BI setup. If that job is not running, every report shows no dimension data and nobody tells you why. It is a five minute fix once you know, and a week of confusion if you do not.

Online only, and only what Microsoft modelled. The apps are for Business Central online, not on-premises. They report what is in the standard tables. If your business lives in extensions, custom fields, a bolt-on warehouse system or a CRM that is not Business Central, those are not in the model. Nor is history before you went live, nor budgets held outside the system, nor anything that needs a definition Microsoft did not anticipate.

When the apps are enough

If you run one company, your reporting questions are the standard ones, your team has Pro licences, and you are happy with Microsoft's definitions of margin, ageing and utilisation, the apps will serve you for a long time. Install them, run the dimension job, put the four reports people actually use on a Teams tab, and spend your money on something else. We would rather tell you that than sell you a build.

When you need to go beyond them

The signal is always the same: someone exports a report to Excel and changes it. The usual reasons are a group view across companies, a definition the business uses that differs from Microsoft's, data from outside Business Central that has to sit beside it, or history and budgets the apps do not hold. At that point the choice is between extending the apps from their source files, which works for small changes and breaks on upgrade for large ones, and building your own semantic model over Business Central, which is what our complete guide to reporting beyond the built-in tools describes. The reporting options explained post compares native, direct Power BI, Jet and Fabric routes side by side.

One practical tip if you do go further: keep Microsoft's measure names where your definitions agree with theirs. A finance team that has learned where Average Collection Period lives in the Finance app should find it in the same place in yours.

What to do this week

If you have Business Central and no Power BI reporting, install the Finance and Sales apps and run the dimension job. If you have them and nobody uses them, the problem is usually the dimension job or the company limit, and both are quick to diagnose. If your team is exporting to Excel, that is the moment to talk about a model of your own, and our free audit is the easiest way to start.

Microsoft's Power BI apps for Business Central: what you get, what you don't, and when to go beyond them