How to Connect Power BI to Business Central

Pairing Microsoft's Power BI with Dynamics 365 Business Central transforms your raw operational data into clear, interactive insights. If you're looking to graduate from static spreadsheets and built-in reports to dynamic dashboards, you’re in the right place. This article will walk you through exactly how to connect Power BI to Business Central, step by step, so you can start visualizing your business performance.

Why Connect Power BI and Business Central?

Business Central is a powerhouse for running your company's day-to-day operations - managing finances, supply chains, sales, and manufacturing. It’s where your most critical business data lives. However, its native reporting features are designed for operational needs, not deep-dive analysis or high-level strategic visualization.

That's where Power BI comes in. It's a business analytics tool designed specifically to create beautiful, interactive dashboards and reports from various data sources. When you connect the two, you unlock several powerful advantages:

Interactive Data Visualization: Move beyond static, multi-page reports. With Power BI, you can create reports where clicking on a single bar in a chart instantly filters all other visuals on the page. You can drill down from an annual sales summary to a single invoice in just a few clicks.
A Single Source of Truth: Your Business Central data becomes the foundation for your analysis, but it doesn’t have to be the only source. You can pull in data from other systems - like your Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, or marketing automation platform - to create a complete, 360-degree view of your business.
Automated Insights: Power BI's AI features can analyze your data and automatically surface trends, outliers, or patterns you might have missed. Ask questions in plain English, and Power BI will generate a chart to answer them on the fly.
Accessible & Sharable Reports: Once you build a report, you can securely publish and share it with colleagues, managers, or stakeholders. They can access real-time dashboards from their web browser or a mobile app, empowering everyone to make data-driven decisions.

Before You Begin: Prerequisites for a Smooth Connection

Before you jump in, a little preparation will ensure the connection process is painless. Make sure you have the following ready:

A Power BI Account: You can start with a free Power BI account to connect your data and build reports for personal use. However, to share your reports with others, you'll need a Power BI Pro or Premium license.
A Business Central Account: Naturally, you need access to Business Central. More importantly, your account must have the appropriate permissions to read the data you want to analyze. If you find you can't access a specific data set, you may need to speak with your Business Central administrator to adjust your permissions.
Power BI Desktop: While some work can be done in the web version of Power BI, the most robust features for connecting and transforming data are in the free Power BI Desktop application. Be sure to download and install it on your computer.
An Idea of What Data You Need: Business Central exposes its data through something called web services or APIs. Think of these as organized, secure gateways to your data tables (like Customers, Items, or General Ledger Entries). Knowing whether you want to analyze sales, finance, or inventory data will help you find the right table quickly.

Connecting Power BI to Business Central: A Step-by-Step Guide

With the prerequisites out of the way, you're ready to make the connection. Follow these steps carefully, and you'll have your data flowing in no time.

Step 1: Find the Business Central Connector

First, open the Power BI Desktop application you installed. In the 'Home' tab of the ribbon at the top, click on Get Data. This will open a window with a long list of potential data sources.

To save time, use the search bar and type "Business Central." You will likely see two options:

Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central (on-premises)

If your company uses the cloud-based version of Business Central (which most do), select the first option. Click Connect.

Step 2: Sign In and Choose Your Environment

Power BI will now prompt you to sign in. It’s crucial that you sign in with your organizational account - the same Microsoft 365 email and password you use to log in to Business Central. This authenticates your identity and confirms you have permission to access the data.

After you’ve successfully signed in, Power BI will detect the Business Central environments linked to your account. Most companies have at least a "Production" environment (where your live business data resides) and a "Sandbox" environment (for testing). Select the environment you want to pull data from, typically Production. Then, select your company's name from the list that appears.

Step 3: Browse Your Data in the Navigator

This next screen is the Navigator window, and it's your entry point to all the data Business Central has made available. It can look a little intimidating at first, but it's logically organized.

You'll see your company name with a list of folders underneath it. Look for a folder named Standard APIs v2.0. This folder contains a curated list of standard, analytically-friendly data tables provided by Microsoft. It's the best place to start. You may also see other folders for custom web services that your administrator or third-party apps have set up.

Expand the Standard APIs v2.0 folder to see the list of available data tables. They are typically named in a readable format, such as customers, items, salesInvoices, and generalLedgerEntries.

Step 4: Select and Load Your Data

Scroll through the list and check the box next to the data table (or tables) you want to analyze. For this example, let’s say you want to analyze sales, so you check the box next to salesInvoices.

As you select a table, Power BI will show you a small preview of the data on the right. This lets you quickly confirm it’s what you're looking for.

At the bottom of the Navigator window, you'll see two buttons:

Load: This option pulls the data directly into your Power BI model as-is. It’s quick and easy, but often not ideal.
Transform Data: This is the recommended option. It opens the Power Query Editor, a powerful tool that lets you clean, shape, and prepare your data before it's loaded into your report.

Click Transform Data. This is where the real magic happens.

Step 5 (Highly Recommended): Prepare Your Data in Power Query

The Power Query Editor is like a preparation station for your data. Raw data from any ERP system, including Business Central, is rarely perfect for analysis. Power Query lets you fix that without altering the original source data.

Here are a few common preparation steps you might take:

Remove Unnecessary Columns: Your salesInvoices table might have 50+ columns, but you may only need 10 of them for your report. Selecting the columns you don't need and clicking "Remove Columns" makes your data model cleaner and faster.
Rename Columns: Some column names from Business Central might not be user-friendly (e.g., document_Date or customerPostingGroup). You can easily rename them to something simple like "Invoice Date" or "Customer Group."
Check Data Types: Ensure that numbers are formatted as numbers, dates as dates, and text as text. Sometimes a date column might come in as text, and you'll need to change its type to perform date-based calculations later.
Filter Rows: If you only need data from the current fiscal year, you can add a filter to exclude older records. This dramatically improves report performance.

Once you are happy with how your data looks, click the Close & Apply button in the top-left corner. Power BI will now load your clean, prepared data into the report model.

Visualizing Your Business Central Data in Power BI

With your data loaded, you'll land in the main Power BI report view. On the far right is the Data pane, where you can see your selected tables and all their columns (which you just cleaned up!).

Now, you can start building visuals. It's as simple as dragging and dropping.

Want to see sales by customer? Drag the "Customer Name" field onto the report canvas, then drag the "Total Amount" field onto it. Power BI will automatically create a chart.
Want to see sales trending over time? Create a line chart and drop your "Invoice Date" field into the Axis and "Total Amount" into the Values.

Once your report is complete, you can click "Publish" to upload it to the Power BI Service, where you can arrange your visuals into a dashboard and share it with your team.

Troubleshooting Common Connection Issues

Sometimes things don't go perfectly. Here are a few common bumps in the road and how to handle them:

Authentication Failed: This almost always means you logged in with the wrong account. Ensure you are using your organizational Microsoft 365 credentials, not a personal Microsoft account.
Can't See a Table in the Navigator: If a specific data table (like Items or GL Entries) isn't appearing, it’s most likely a permissions issue. Your Business Central user account needs "Read" permissions for that data. Contact your administrator to get access.
Very Slow Data Refresh: The amount of data in your ERP can be massive. If your refreshes are taking too long, go back into the Power Query Editor ("Transform Data") and apply filters. Filtering your data to only include the last two years instead of all ten will make a huge difference.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Power BI to Business Central is a fundamental step in building a truly data-driven culture. This process transforms your vital operational data from a simple record-keeping system into a dynamic resource for strategic analysis and decision-making.

While tools like Power BI are incredibly powerful, the process can still involve several manual steps, from connecting sources to transforming data and building charts from scratch. Here at Graphed , we’ve created an even simpler path. We securely connect to all your core business platforms - from finance and sales to marketing - and let you create entire real-time dashboards just by asking in plain English. Instead of building reports, you can have instant conversations with your data, getting from question to insight in seconds, not hours.