Power Platform

Power BI is licensed per user by Microsoft: a free licence for personal use, Pro for sharing reports across the team, Premium Per User for the advanced features, and Microsoft Fabric capacity once you outgrow per-user licensing. Most SMEs run on Pro. The licence is rarely the real cost driver; building the right data model is, and that one-off investment is what every later report reuses.

Yes: Power BI is licensed separately from Business Central, per user, and everyone who opens shared reports needs at least Power BI Pro. The Business Central connector itself costs nothing extra. We map the licence mix before anything gets built, so nothing surprises you on the invoice.

Yes, with a standard Microsoft connector, no custom development. It reads your companies, dimensions and entries from Business Central, refreshes on schedule and respects user permissions. For heavier needs we extend the model through the Business Central APIs. The result is live dashboards on ERP data instead of month-end exports.

Microsoft ships standard Business Central report apps for finance, sales and inventory, and they are a decent day-one baseline. They stop where your specifics start: your margin definition, your product hierarchy, your intercompany structure. We usually start from the standard apps, then rebuild the three reports your management actually runs the business on.

They do different jobs. Business Central’s own reports are operational: open orders, aged receivables, stock lists, printed documents. Power BI is analytical: trends, comparisons and drill-downs across companies and years. You keep both, and stop forcing either tool to do the other’s job.

Margin per customer and per product, sales against budget by channel, stock rotation and dead stock per location, supplier delivery reliability, and open-order value against credit limits. All of it already lives in Business Central; the dashboard is what makes it visible before month-end.

It replaces the clipboard and the Excel file: stocktake and cycle-count apps, goods-in checks with photos, visit reports for field sales, quality checklists on the shop floor. Each app writes straight into Business Central instead of into a spreadsheet someone retypes on Friday.

Start where the email chasing lives: purchase invoice approvals, price-change sign-offs, credit-limit alerts, notifications when a delivery date slips. A useful rule of thumb: if a process is a person forwarding the same email three times, it is a flow.

Microsoft folded Power Virtual Agents into Copilot Studio, the low-code tool for building chatbots and AI agents on your own business data. Combined with Business Central’s MCP server it goes well beyond chat; that story lives on our AI and agentic ERP page.

Power Pages is the Power Platform tool for building secure websites and portals on your business data. The classic wholesale use case is a customer portal: B2B buyers log in and see their own orders, invoices and stock from Business Central instead of emailing your team for every status update. You need it the day those emails become a job.

Yes, with governance: environments that separate playground from production, data-loss-prevention policies on connectors, and a named owner per app. Citizen development works when IT sets the guardrails first, and we set those up as part of every rollout.

Either, and usually both. We design the data model and build the first dashboards, apps and flows; your team takes over the day-to-day with our training. Some clients hand us everything, others only want the foundation laid properly. Both are fine.

An order of magnitude smaller than an ERP project. The first dashboard set or a single app is a short, fixed scope once the data model is right, and the model is where we spend the care. After one discovery call you get a scoped proposal from the consultant who will build it.

Bring one process or one report that frustrates you. A discovery call is enough to scope it, and the first delivery proves the model on something your team feels immediately. Your first conversation is with a senior consultant, not a sales rep.