Setting up Power BI in Microsoft D365 Business Central

We are going to keep going on Business Central. As you can see we are logged in here in Business Central, for those who are new to Business central, Business Central is pretty much NAV; it's in the cloud so it has the same features and functionalities, just looks a lot better and has new features that are really cool.

Item list
I'm here in the item list, as you can see very nice, with pictures and all that, and here on the right-hand side, I have something called power BI reports, this is hooked up to Power BI, it's giving me a report as you can see and if I actually move to a different Item like right here, this is updating so it's like a fact box, there on the side. Gives me statistics on the item and I can go here and see like this, I can see what was sold, what was bought, I can see a chart here and all that.

But we can change, we can create our own stuff here, this is power B, we can do a lot of things. I can show by month, this is already showing by month, I can show the data, let's do that. It’s a little app or power BI window that It's being shown here, so my point is not to just make a big highlight out of this.

Let's figure out how to actually set this up because when you walk up to business central this doesn't come up. I'll show you what comes up. I go into customers, for example, customer list which also has a power BI fact box. And you see here there are no enabled reports, choose or select report to see a list of reports so you can display. If you haven't set anything up in Power BI, nothing will come up here. So, you cannot set this up.

Setup Power BI
What you must do is actually set up power BI right here. So, actually, you can go into Power BI by searching through here into all apps etc. But I just navigated to power BI here on Power Bi .com and I logged in under my login and here I have the apps. Right now, I created one app which was for the items, I'm going to go ahead and add another one for the customers.

I go in here, just go in all apps and Business Central, when I actually go and look up in power BI for Business central stuff, it gives me a bunch of apps here, the idea is that these apps are actually connected to the fact boxes. Microsoft setup all the apps for the fact boxes. All you have to do is pick them into your account in Power BI, and I'm going to show you how to enable it into Business Central.

We are here and see there is a customer list, get it now. It starts thinking and now I have to hold. So, now we actually have to put in the company name and the company name, if I go into Business Central right here, obviously you should know your company name. But it's here up-top so I'm using Cronus USA, INC. We must use it exactly. Next, it identifies me because I'm already logged into Business Central. My login actually works for that, so it's working always on my login.

Now it's installing the app, saying it could take a little while ;If you are not familiar with Power BI, this is a power BI work space in the cloud where you can actually install apps and you can create your own work space and actually I might get a little bit more into that; Right now I have this, which is for the items but I want to get the next one. I just refreshed. That's the item list, so right now I have this customer list thing and it's already connecting to the data that is in Business Central. This is customer list, that is great.

Connect Power BI to Business Central
Now I'm going to go ahead and connect it to business central, we go back here, let's go to customers, and you know you might think this is a lot of work, just to connect Power BI, it should just connect automatically. But the thing is that you can do so much with Power BI. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm just plugin in some fact box on the side. You can create your own reports, interactive business intelligence dashboards and that is the whole power of it.

I'm in the customer list, what I just did. Now, this actually comes up. I have this report, customer list if I say ok. I might need to refresh. It's being a little bit tricky. Enable. There is a button up here that says enable; I should have known this, I did this before, short-term memory is gone! never mind; Hit ok, now it comes. NOw we have the customer Power BI up and running.

Basically, all you have to do is go in here, set up the app for Microsoft you just get it in the store and n your account which is the same login as you log in to Business Central and then you are able to actually come into Power Bi reports, select the report. And now you loaded it up and now it works just like It did before .. If I go into a different customer, you can see its actually connecting. School of Very Fine art, alpine Ski house. All good.

So, that’s Power BI connecting to Business Central, again super cool, so easy, so nice, we are in the cloud, everything connects, everything is fantastic.