CREATE A POWER BI REPORT TO DISPLAY MICROSOFT D365 BUSINESS CENTRAL DATA

Hi,

In this article, I will explain how to make your Dynamics 365 Business Central data available as a data source in Power BI Desktop and build powerful reports for your business.

Note that this is not the Power Bi tutorial. In this article, I will only describe how to get started using Power BI desktop to create a simple report that displays Business Central data. After you create the report, you can publish it to your Power BI service, once the report is in the Power BI service, users that are set up for it, can then view the reports in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Now, let's create a report for Customer Ledger Entries.

• STEP 1: Go to the Customer List Page in business central.

• STEP 2: Click on "Settings (button)" in the Customers List, and select Personalize.

• STEP 3: In the personalize setting you'll see that the power bi dashboard in the fact box is hidden by default, click the show button to make it visible.

• STEP 4: After enabling the Power Bi report, click the button 'Done' to close the personalize settings and then open the Power Bi desktop.

• STEP 5: In the Power BI Desktop click 'Get Data' and select the OData feed.

• STEP 6: Now go to Business Central and search for 'Web Services'.

• STEP 7: In the list of all web services search for the Customer Ledger Entries or any other service for which you want to create the report, and copy the OData link for that service.

• STEP 8: Paste that link in the OData feed window in Power Bi Desktop, and click OK.

• STEP 9: Before the data is loaded, if it asks you about authentication. Then Follow these steps.

• Go to the 'Users' in the Business Central.

• Select the user, (I'm selecting the admin user to which I'm currently logged in for my sandbox environment).

• On the user card page copy the User Name, and Web Service Key, then paste it into the Power Bi.

• STEP 10: Once the user is authenticated you'll see the window with your data from the business central web service. Let's load the data and get started with the Power Bi report.

• STEP 11: Set the report layout, according to your business central page requirement. Right now I'm setting the width to '325' pixels and height to '310' pixels to make it visible on the fact box.

• STEP 12: Add some fields, to make it simple. I'm adding the Customer No, Customer Name, Document No, Document Type, and Amount.

• STEP 13: Make sure to add the filter to see the records on the customer list page. I'm adding a filter by Customer No. on all pages for the report Customer Ledger Entries.

• STEP 14: Save the report on your local disk and click 'Publish' to publish the report on the Power Bi service.

• STEP 15: Select the destination to which you want to publish your report. I'm selecting 'My workspace'. Once you select the destination you'll see the report is being published.

• STEP 16: Now go to the business central fact box on the customer list page, click the select report, and enable the report that you want to see from your workspace.

• STEP 17: Now you will see that your report is finally published. you can filter the record based on the customers from the list.

It's in the cloud, and it took us no time at all, how easy it was, you can just create a Power BI report, put it into the dashboard, and select it. How cool is this? with no programming. Just clicking.

Hope you find this useful. Stay tuned for many other articles about Business Central Development, Integration, and Power BI.

If you have any suggestions/questions, please comment on the post.

Regards

Govinda Kumar