💁 About this article
This article is part of Fugo’s Power BI knowledge base: a collection of resources answering common Power BI questions. We include notes throughout where Fugo’s integration may be helpful for displaying dashboards on digital signage.
Table of contents
Short answer
“Power BI Business Central” refers to the integration between Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
It’s not a standalone product, feature, or license. It’s a set of connectors, built-in reports, and integration points that allow Power BI to visualize Business Central data.
What Business Central and Power BI are (separately)
To understand the integration, it helps to separate the two products:
Business Central is an ERP system used for finance, operations, inventory, and accounting.
Power BI is a business intelligence platform used to model data and build dashboards and reports.
Power BI does not replace Business Central’s reporting. It sits on top of Business Central to provide more flexible, interactive analysis.
How Power BI connects to Business Central
Power BI can access Business Central data in several ways, depending on setup and scale:
Built-in connectors and APIs
Power BI can connect directly to Business Central’s APIs to pull financial and operational data.Power BI apps for Business Central
Microsoft publishes prebuilt Power BI apps that expose common Business Central datasets and reports.Dataflows, datamarts, or data warehouses
Larger organizations often extract Business Central data into a data warehouse before reporting, rather than querying the ERP directly.
Direct connections are convenient for getting started, but they’re not always ideal for large datasets or complex reporting.
Built-in Power BI reports for Business Central
Business Central includes several prebuilt Power BI reports and apps, especially for finance and operations.
These typically allow users to:
View financial overviews
Track KPIs
Drill into common accounting and operational metrics
Embed Power BI visuals directly inside the Business Central interface
For quick insights, these built-in reports are often sufficient. More complex analysis usually requires custom models in Power BI.
Common challenges with Business Central data in Power BI
Teams new to Business Central often run into similar issues:
Performance limitations when querying large datasets directly from APIs
Duplicate or inflated values when dimensions are modeled incorrectly
Complex dimensional structures that don’t behave like flat tables
Slow refresh times for large financial datasets
These aren’t Power BI problems so much as data modeling and architecture challenges.
How teams typically architect reporting for Business Central
In practice, many organizations evolve toward one of these approaches:
Small deployments
Direct Power BI connections to Business Central, with scheduled imports.Mid-size teams
Dataflows or datamarts that stage Business Central data before reporting.Larger or finance-heavy environments
A dedicated data warehouse that consolidates Business Central data with other systems (CRM, billing, payroll).
The tradeoff is usually between freshness and performance. Real-time data is rarely necessary for financial reporting, while reliable and consistent models usually are.
Summary
Power BI Business Central is an integration, not a separate product
Power BI visualizes data that lives in Business Central
Microsoft provides built-in reports, connectors, and apps
Larger datasets often require staging or warehousing for performance
Most challenges come from data modeling, not Power BI itself
Understanding this helps set realistic expectations when moving reporting out of Business Central and into Power BI.
💡 Power BI on digital signage with Fugo
Business Central dashboards are often used by finance and operations teams who need shared visibility into KPIs throughout the day. When Power BI reports based on Business Central data need to appear on office screens or operational displays, Power BI alone isn’t designed for that delivery model.
Fugo’s Power BI app allows Business Central–backed Power BI dashboards to be displayed securely on digital signage. You can try it on a free trial or book a demo to see how teams deploy shared financial and operational dashboards on screens.