Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 5 (2024 release wave 1)

This is part 5 in a series of blog posts about Analytics, BI, and reporting in Dynamics 365 Business Central from 2020 until now. In this post, I will tell stories from the 2024 release wave 1.

If you missed it, maybe start from the beginning. Open part 1 in a new browser tab

Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 1 (2020 release wave 1+2)

and then get back here.

Focus areas in 2024 (release wave 1)

2024 was the year of AI and co-pilots. I will touch upon part of this story below when it overlaps with analytics. But specifically for reporting and analytics, our focus was very much dedicated to built-in reporting content (see strategy section below).

Executing on the analytics strategy

Our product strategy for analytics and reporting strategy has three fundamental pillars:

1. Consume data: Core business scenarios have out-of-the-box reporting/analytics

2. Enable: Most user analytics needs covered with no-code/low-code solutions

3. Enable: Customers have access to all data – for BI and advanced analytics

In 2024, our focus was mainly on pillars 1+2: prioritizing very hard the content part of the strategy (pillar 1) and on no-code AI driven ad-hoc analysis features (pillar 2).

As for pillar 3, one part of the vision is to enable Business Central data in Microsoft Fabric Onelake (no timeline to share for this initiative). For more information, see Introduction to Microsoft Fabric and Business Central .

Built-in Excel reports (at last)

The first type of content we worked on in the 2024 release wave 1 was Excel reports. Ever since the introduction of the Excel layout feature back in 2022, I had longed to see our app teams pick up on the platform capability and this year, we finally made it happen. You might wonder why it took so long, but behind the scenes in the product group you find reasons why. You see, our Finance app team wanted to build reports for Excel and Power BI that shared the same data source: APIs. And if you know where to look (hint: not in our documentation), you can actually find a range of APIs that expose finance data. The APIs are still in beta and might not even be released to GA. Why? Well, APIs are sticky. One of the main ideas to have APIs is that consumers can trust that the APIs do not change. As we were not completely sure of how to consume the finance (analytical) APIs in our own reports, we were a little reluctant to just open them up to the rest of the world.

When we finally started looking more seriously into creating Excel reports for finance, we discovered some gaps in the Excel layout feature itself, namely

1. If a dataset had multiple top-level dataitems, the data model in Excel needed to reflect these as multiple data worksheets (so we fixed that in version 23.4)

2. Reports in Business Central are translated to the users' language when the report is rendered. Excel has no built-in translation model, so we needed to implement this in the Excel layout feature (fixed in version 23.4)

3. The data model in Excel had no context of when and how the report was rendered. This meant that it was impossible to implement refreshable reports (so we added a metadata worksheet in version 23.4)

For more information about all these new capabilities in Excel layouts, see Creating an Excel layout report (developer documentation) .

With all these new capabilities, our finance app team were finally ready to add 11 new finance, sales, and sustainability reports with Excel layouts on top. You can see a demo of some of them in this video from the 2024w1 launch event: What's new: Excel reports for finance and sales (youtube.com) . Yay!

Built-in Power BI reports (at last)

With infrastructure in place for embedding Power BI, we were finally ready to go full steam on getting built-in Power BI reports available in Business Central. And at the Directions Asia conference in May 2024, we finally announced that reports were coming and made them available for private preview with a select few customers.

Feedback from customers in the preview has been very positive and we are very excited to make the reports available to a broader audience in 2024 release wave 2.

If you are a Business Central partner, you can get access to all the reports in the private preview. For more information, see https://www.yammer.com/dynamicsnavdev/threads/2893156145332224

If you want to see the user documentation for the new reports get to life, we are working on that in a public GitHub repository that everyone can read from. For more information, see Project-Yellowstone-Documentation/business-central

Copilots and analytics

It should not come as a surprise to you that genAI and copilots were a big part of the 2024 release. Two copilots in particular are of interest with respect to analytics:

1. Analysis assist (in preview)

2. Chat with Copilot (in preview)

With Analysis assist, users can use a chat interface to iteratively build an analysis tab that match their question. When I first heard about this feature, I was not impressed. You see, I'm old in the analytics business. For me, doing a pivot table on data in Excel or slicing an OLAP cube seems natural and the user interfaces (UI) with filter panes and summarize fields does the job for me. I have likely also forgotten how I struggled learning this UI 20+ years ago. I remember a conversation I had with my wife walking our dog around the lakes of Copenhagen where I said

Ha ha ha, can you imagine. Someone in my team wants to add a chat interface to Data Analysis to make it easier to create an analysis. I' certain that no-one will ever use that. Total waste of time.

To my surprise, my wife said

I still struggle with the UI in Excel when I need to work with pivot tables. So, I think that a chat interface would make a lot of sense.

To add some context to the conversation, my wife is a senior researcher, working with meta-analysis, surveys, and statistical methods on a daily basis (== she is quite smart). And then it dawned on me: I was biased. And a dinosaur. So, when I participated in the end-to-end testing phase for Analysis assist, I decided to take it for a spin and challenge it with prompts that was far away from "group by X and pivot on Y". My very first prompt was

Show me what our customers owe us

and to my surprise, IT WORKED!!! The AI model actually understood my question and was able to create an analysis that showed just that. I was an instant fan. The example also became a "hero scenario" that we used in the launch event video (see it here: https://youtu.be/mHrY_OI0qNo?feature=shared&t=683 ).

The other Copilot feature related to analytics is Chat with Copilot. Initially, this feature offers an experience similar to search in data, where users can express themselves in their own words to find records in Business Central, so maybe it is a stretch to call this an analytics feature yet. But imagine that the chat interface can use more skills than just finding records. What if the chat interface can suggest creating and opening an analysis view? Or what if the copilot can suggest "there is a standard report for that" (which it actually already can do). As copilots pick up more and more skills, I am certain that this will be soo powerful for users - also in the analytics space. For more information on Chat with Copilot, see Introducing: Chat with Copilot (youtube.com)

User documentation on analytics

Back in 2023, we successfully communicated how to (re)think analytics to developers and consultants, using the BI triangle model to tell the story of which tools to use for which analytics scenarios and roles. Now it was time to do the same for our users. We did three things:

1. Added completely new landing page and sections describing all analytics scenarios, roles, and the tools that support them (the BI triangle) in general terms. But also adding articles on how to get data-driven in an organization, describing what KPIs are, how to define the ones that matter for your company, and how to track them. For more information of the new user documentation, see aka.ms/bcReporting

2. For each of the functional areas Finance, Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, and Fixed Assets Management, we added new sections Finance Analytics, Sales Analytics, ..., where the BI triangle is described in context of the area. For more information of the new context specific documentation, visit this landing page: Analytics by functional area

3. We did a mix'n'match of the two, adding overview pages Analytics by functional area (see Analytics by functional area), Ad-hoc data analysis by functional area (Ad-hoc data analysis by functional area), and Report overview by functional area (Report overview) to the general analytics section

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That's it for now. Thanks for reading along. Do comment on things that resonated with you when reading the article. Next post will be about reporting improvements in the 2024 release waves 2 (the upcoming release wave).

If you are present at the Days of Knowledge Americas 2024 conference this September in Atlanta, then you can hear the full story in one of my sessions there.

Want to read earlier posts in the series. See them here:

• Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 1 (2020 release wave 1+2)

• Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 2 (2021 release wave 1+2)

• Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 3 (2022 release wave 1+2)

• Analytics, BI, and reporting in Business Central from 2020 until now - part 4 (2023 release wave 1+2)

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