Business Central reporting is at a crossroads. If you’re in finance, you want the speed and flexibility of Excel. IT wants a single source of truth, not a mess of disconnected workbooks. Leadership? Of course they want both—plus answers on demand, especially when Copilot or Power BI gets thrown into the mix. The stakes: get this wrong, and you’re stuck reconciling numbers before every board meeting.
The standard advice treats this situation as an implied trade-off: give finance freedom in Excel and accept some of the inevitable mess, or impose governance with the expectation that finance now has to learn a new tool. Most Business Central reporting tools are built around picking one side of that trade and compromising on the other. Jet, Solver, and Power BI are all credible tools for what they’re built to do. Each approaches the balance between Excel self-service, governance, and platform scope differently, and BC teams evaluating them often discover those tradeoffs only after they’ve already deployed one.
But ultimately, that’s the wrong framing. Self-service reporting and governed data are separable problems. Most Business Central reporting tools collapse them into one, and that collapse is why self-service earned a bad reputation in the first place.
Why Self-Service Became a Dirty Word
Self-service reporting was supposed to free finance and ops teams from waiting on IT for every new report. In practice, in a lot of Business Central shops, it did the opposite, multiplying the spreadsheet problem instead of solving it.
Give twenty finance and ops users export access to Business Central and Excel skills, and you’ll get twenty different versions of “gross margin.” Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because nothing forced those twenty reports to share a definition. Each workbook calculates margin the way its builder understood it six months ago, using whatever date range and account grouping made sense at the time. None of them updates when BC’s chart of accounts changes. All of them get treated as authoritative by whoever built them.
This is the self-service paradox: the more access you hand out without a shared layer underneath it, the more inconsistent your numbers get. Speed goes up. Trust goes down. By the time someone needs to reconcile three conflicting versions of the same report before a board meeting, “self-service” has become the explanation for why nobody can agree on the numbers, not the reason they got faster.
The instinct this inevitably produces is to swing the other way: lock reporting down, route everything through a BI team or a single analyst, and require a ticket for anything new. That fixes consistency and recreates the original bottleneck. Neither extreme is the actual goal. The goal is self-service reporting that’s fast because it’s governed, not despite it.
Business Central Data Governance Isn’t as Complicated as You Think
‘Data governance’ usually conjures compliance committees and stewardship policies. In the context of Excel reporting against Business Central, it means something narrower and more practical: a calculation gets defined once, in one place, and every report that uses it pulls from that definition instead of rebuilding it.
That’s the entire distinction. A governed model means “net revenue” has one formula, one set of inclusions and exclusions, and one source table. That definition lives in the data layer. It doesn’t live in a cell range someone copied from last quarter’s file. When BC’s customer dimensions change, or a new entity gets added, the definition updates centrally, and every report built on it inherits the change automatically. Nobody has to remember which of the fourteen workbooks needs a manual fix.
This is also where AI-readiness and governance turn out to be the same problem wearing different names. Copilot, Power BI’s Q&A feature, and any natural-language reporting layer Microsoft ships next all depend on stable, well-labelled definitions sitting underneath them. A governed Excel model and an AI-ready Excel model are the same artifact, built once.
Governance in this sense doesn’t mean less access. A controller can still build a custom view, filter by region, and add their own formatting. What they can’t do is silently redefine what “active customer” means for their version of the report. The freedom moves to presentation, layout, and ad hoc analysis. The definitions stay fixed underneath.
Where Jet Reports, Solver, and Power BI Fall Short for Self-Service Business Central Reporting
It’s worth being specific about why the existing options split this problem in half instead of solving it.
Jet Reports on it’s own solves the Excel-native half. Built originally for Dynamics NAV and later extended to Business Central, Jet lets users query live BC data directly from Excel using its own formula language. That’s a real advantage for live access, and it’s why Jet still has a strong footprint in BC shops with a long Dynamics history. But that architecture is also the limitation: each report queries BC more or less independently, using whatever logic the formula author wrote. There’s no shared model enforcing a single definition of margin or revenue across reports and running several formula-heavy reports at once means querying the live tenant repeatedly rather than pulling from a dedicated model built for simultaneous, multi-source reporting.
Solver solves more of the governance problem through a broader CPM platform. Its report designer still lives in Excel through a cloud-connected add-in, while report delivery and consumption can shift to Solver’s web portal. The bigger tradeoff is scope: Solver also extends into budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and data warehousing. For organizations that need a full CPM platform, that breadth can be a strength. For Business Central teams primarily looking for governed self-service reporting in Excel, it can mean implementing more platform than the reporting use case itself requires.
Standalone Power BI can absolutely deliver governance — a well-built semantic model enforces consistent definitions just as well as any dedicated reporting platform. The catch is who has to build it. Getting there requires DAX, data modeling expertise, and ongoing maintenance as Business Central’s underlying tables change, which puts the governance layer back in the hands of a specialist rather than in the hands of the finance team that actually needs to use it. For users who live in Excel by habit and necessity, that’s not self-service. It’s a different bottleneck wearing a nicer interface.
Jet, Solver, and Power BI are all credible tools for what they’re built to do. Each one was built around a different half of the same problem, and BC teams evaluating them often discover the gap only after they’ve already deployed one.
The Architecture That Actually Closes the D365 BC Reporting Gap
Closing it requires separating two things that most tools bundle together: where the data is governed and where it’s used.
The governed layer is a data model that sits between Business Central and Excel. It isn’t a copy of BC’s raw tables. It’s a structured warehouse holding stable definitions for revenue, margin, and the customer and item records that those figures roll up to, definitions that stay intact as BC’s underlying data changes. That model owns the calculation logic. It’s where dimension changes get handled, where multi-entity consolidation happens, and where the same number means the same thing no matter which report pulls it.
The usage layer stays exactly where finance and ops teams already work: Excel. Reports get built, formatted, and filtered using normal Excel skills, with no SQL or DAX, and nobody waiting on a developer to get to it. The difference from an ungoverned export is what’s underneath. Hitting refresh doesn’t paste a new static snapshot into the same brittle file. It pulls current data through the same governed definitions, every time, for every report, for every user.
This is the model we built Cosmos around: a Business Central data model running on Azure, with Excel as the interface rather than the engine. Reports are designed right in Excel, while the processing runs in the cloud through the Cosmos Data Engine. That’s also why Cosmos reports run roughly 48x faster than tools that process everything inside Excel itself. Multiple reports can run at once without freezing anyone’s spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet isn’t doing the work. Governance and self-service stop competing for the same resource, because they’re not happening in the same place.
What Governed Business Central Reporting Looks Like in Practice
The split between the governed model and the Excel front end varies depending on which part of the business is requesting numbers.
In finance, the recurring problem is definitional drift: the income statement, the budget-vs-actual pack, and the board deck calculating margin three slightly different ways. A governed model fixes this by making margin a property of the data layer rather than a formula choice each report author makes independently. Close-cycle reports that used to require manual reconciliation across workbooks instead pull from the same underlying numbers, refreshed on demand.
In sales, the typical ask is dimensional: performance broken out by rep, then re-cut by region, then re-cut again by product line, depending on who’s asking and what they’re trying to settle. Because the governed model already carries BC’s customer, item, and salesperson dimensions in a structured form, building a new cut doesn’t mean writing a new query against raw ledger tables. It means applying a different filter to a model that already understands what those dimensions mean.
In inventory, the pain point is usually multi-entity or multi-warehouse visibility: the same item behaves differently across legal entities or locations, and reconciliation is done manually because each entity’s data lives in its own export. A governed, multi-source model consolidates data at the data layer rather than in Power Query, so a single report can answer questions across entities without separate connections and refresh schedules for each.
The common thread across all three: the Excel experience doesn’t change. What changes is whether the number on the screen means the same thing as the number on someone else’s screen.
What to Ask When Evaluating a Self-Service Reporting Tool for Business Central
Most reporting demos look polished. The harder question is whether the tool actually separates governance from self-service, or just relocates the bottleneck. A few questions surface that quickly:
- Does a finance user build and modify the report entirely in Excel, or does part of the workflow require a different interface, a developer, or a ticket?
- If two people build two different reports using the same metric, are they guaranteed to get the same number, or does that depend on each person building the calculation correctly on their own?
- What happens to existing reports when Business Central’s chart of accounts or entity structure changes? Do they update automatically, or does someone have to track down and fix each one individually?
- Can more than one report be run at a time without slowing down or locking up Excel?
- Is the underlying data model something a business user can actually extend with new filters and views, or does any structural change require specialized skills nobody on the team has?
A tool that handles the first half of these questions well and the second half poorly is solving half the problem. That’s the pattern worth watching for, because it’s exactly how teams end up replacing one reporting headache with another.
Excel Was Never the Problem with Reporting
The instinct to blame Excel for fragile reporting is understandable and slightly off-target. Excel is exactly as good as it’s ever been at displaying, filtering, and presenting numbers. What breaks is the connection between Excel and the underlying data. That’s a governance problem. It isn’t an Excel problem.
Self-service reporting that actually works gives finance and ops teams the Excel they already know, backed by a model where the numbers are defined once and trusted everywhere. Speed and control no longer compete once governance and usage are no longer in the same place.
See what governed, self-service Excel reporting looks like against your own Business Central data.
