What is new in Cosmos for Business Central in 2026

Six Power BI report packs, a Dataverse connector, Fabric as a data source and SOC 2: what Cosmos for Business Central now does, and where it fits among the reporting routes.

The short answer

Cosmos, from Cosmos Data Technologies, is a cloud reporting and analytics tool built for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It gives business users a structured, ready-to-use Business Central data model to report from in Excel and Power BI, with no coding and no exports. 2026 has brought six pre-built Power BI report packs, a Dataverse connector, Microsoft Fabric as a data source and a completed SOC 2 Type 1 examination, and the Cosmos team is at Directions EMEA in Paris from 27 to 29 October.

Hopton is a Cosmos partner for the UK and Ireland. This post is a plain summary of what Cosmos does, what has changed this year, and where it fits in the wider set of Business Central reporting routes.

What Cosmos is, and what it is not

First, the name. Cosmos is not Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft's database service. It is a Business Central reporting product from an independent software company, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

A Business Central database, like most ERPs, is built to record transactions quickly and reliably. It is not built to answer questions. A sales report that finance would recognise can need data from around 15 tables. Cosmos takes the raw Business Central data, applies the lookups, calculations and merges in the background, and presents one governed, multi-company data model that a business user can report from. Excel is the main authoring tool, through an add-in with around 30 ready-made report templates. Power BI connects to the same model, so Excel and Power BI give the same numbers.

Six pre-built Power BI report packs

On 25 August 2026 Cosmos released six multi-page Power BI reports built on its data model, delivered through the Power BI integration add-on:

Finance: revenue, gross profit, net income, cash and the P&L, with drill-through.
Sales: sales, costs and profitability by item category, item and salesperson.
Inventory: stock value, turns and days of supply by location.
Accounts Payable: ageing, upcoming due dates and vendor balances.
Accounts Receivable: ageing, days sales outstanding and collections.
Purchasing: open orders, spend by vendor and category, and supplier performance.

All six support reporting across several Business Central companies, and all six can be edited: you can change visuals, add pages and add measures. Our view is that the value is less the dashboards themselves than the fact that they sit on the same governed model as the Excel reports. Microsoft's own Power BI apps for Business Central are free and worth a look first, but they are single-company and they use Microsoft's definitions. The Cosmos packs use yours, across all your companies.

Dataverse: CRM and project data next to the ledger

The Dataverse connector, available to Cosmos customers since December 2025, loads data from Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Marketing and Project Operations into the same Azure-hosted model as Business Central. In practice that means pipeline against invoiced revenue, case volumes against contract value, or project cost against billing, in one report without a manual join in Excel. Custom Power Apps data held in Dataverse comes through the same route.

Microsoft Fabric as a data source

Cosmos can now connect to Microsoft Fabric as a data source. If you mirror your Business Central data into Fabric, Cosmos can point at Fabric as its Business Central source instead of reading from Business Central directly. We wrote about what the mirroring preview means earlier this month. The significance here is that Cosmos and a Fabric platform stop being an either-or. A business can build its estate on Fabric and still give finance a ready-made Business Central reporting layer on top.

Many companies, many currencies, more dimensions

Business Central logs a user into one company at a time, and its native reports are single-company. Cosmos connects to one or more Business Central environments and builds one model across as many companies as you need, reporting in one or more currencies down to transaction level. Cosmos's technical director has described customers consolidating around 100 companies this way.

The two global dimensions in Business Central are a familiar constraint. Choose the wrong two at implementation and you live with it. Cosmos relaxes this by extending the transactional tables in its model with further dimension values down to entry level, which gives the effect of three, four or more global dimensions in reporting without changing Business Central.

Other sources, and history from the old system

Beyond Business Central and Dataverse, Cosmos takes in Excel files and Azure SQL, which covers budgets held in spreadsheets, membership or statistical data, and the odd departmental database. The use we rate most is history. When a business moves to Business Central from NAV, GP, Sage or anything else, it usually opens with balances and loses the ability to compare against prior years. Cosmos can load the historical transactions and join them to the new Business Central data in the model, so a sales trend runs across the migration without the user knowing where the join is. Our complete guide to Business Central reporting with Power BI covers the same problem from the Power BI side.

Scheduling and distribution

Reports authored in the Excel add-in can be scheduled and distributed by email or straight to a SharePoint location, in Excel or PDF, with batch reporting for large runs. Recipients do not need to be Cosmos users, or even Business Central users. Cosmos says some UK customers push out more than 1,500 reports a month this way. Power BI refreshes run on the Power BI service, from the same model, and Cosmos users can open Power BI dashboards from the Cosmos portal.

Trust, recognition and what is on the roadmap

Cosmos completed a SOC 2 Type 1 examination in June 2026. In February 2026 it was named Best Value by Capterra and Most Recommended and Best Customer Support by Software Advice, both Gartner Digital Markets brands. At Directions North America in April, Cosmos set out a roadmap that included a new report engine, a second-generation Excel add-in and Microsoft Copilot integration. We will write those up when they ship rather than before.

Where Cosmos fits, and where it does not

Cosmos is a good fit for Business Central teams who want a ready-made reporting tool with nothing to build or run, who need several companies or currencies in one view, and who want finance working in Excel with Power BI on the same numbers. It is less suited to businesses that want a data platform they own and extend, that have many non-Dynamics sources at scale, or that need to engineer their own models. For those we would point to Jet Analytics or a Fabric platform, and we partner on both, so the recommendation is not a sales choice. The decision logic is in the three routes to Business Central reporting.

Working with Hopton on Cosmos

We implement Cosmos around how your business reports, build your first reports, train your teams and support them after go-live, as part of a view across your whole data estate rather than a reporting project on its own. The usual starting point is a free audit of how your teams report from Business Central today. Details are on our Cosmos partner page, or get in touch.

What is new in Cosmos for Business Central in 2026? Power BI report packs, Dataverse and Fabric as sources, and reporting across many companies