Dynamics 365 Business Central: Project Yellowstone is here…

With Dynamics 365 Business Central version 25.1 Microsoft has silently officially released the so called “Project Yellowstone“, alias a set of embedded Power BI apps and reports that significantly enhances the KPIs and BI reporting inside the application.

Project Yellowstone was publicly announced at Directions EMEA today, so I can now say you something more about what’s in the box.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central version 25.1, you have now Power BI apps for the following functional areas:

• Finance
• Sales
• Purchasing
• Inventory
• Inventory Valuation
• Warehouse
• Projects

Each app consists of two components:

• A connector (AL) app that contains APIs, setup pages, and embed pages (Power BI Reports app preinstalled in every Dynamics 365 Business Central environment).
• A set of Power BI template apps that contain a Power BI semantic model (dataset) and pre-built Power BI reports.

The Power BI apps are available at the following links:

To install these templates in your PBI environment, you need to have a Power BI Pro license. Each PBI reports is connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central data via APIs.

In order to start using the new PBI reports, you need to open each app in Power BI and connect it to your Dynamics 365 Business Central environment (the app by default starts with demo data).

Here is an example of reports in the Sales app:

As you can see, every apps starts with an Overview report and then has lots of detailed reports, directly available in the left menu. As an example, the Moving Average report gives a clear picture of your organization’s average sales over a 30 day period:

The Moving Annual Total (MAT) report calculates a total of sales over the last 12 months and showcases the sales amount moving annual total (MAT) by comparing it to the MAT for the previous period:

The Month-to-Date (MTD) report provides a detailed overview of the total revenue generated from sales activities from the start of the month up until the current date:

These are only examples, I encourage you to try the apps.

The Inventory app gives you interesting analysis about your item’s Inventory levels. I love for example the Purchase and Sales Quantity report, that shows how your stocks are moving considering sales and purchases:

Another interesting report is the Item Availability report, that permits you to select an item category or a single item and see how the inventory is moving (you can see when you will be out of stock):

Also Projects have interesting reports to evaluate costs and budgets and WIP:

and to monitor sales invoices for tasks:

All these reports are available (and usable) also in the Dynamics 365 Business central web client (with dedicated help too):

and also they will be searchable directly from the web client:

In the Assisted Setup page, you can start the wizard to connect Dynamics 365 Business Central to Power BI:

The Power BI Connector Setup page permits you to define parameters for refreshing the reports on each area:

The new Power BI Reports app also adds capabilites in code to handle Power BI reports. Here is an example of AL code for embedding an existing Power BI report into a Business Central page:

With the SetSettings method you can customize the user experience (PBI interaction) as you want.

Power BI is becomign always more a powerful reporting and data analytics tool for Dynamics 365 Business Central and the new embedded experience will be a great addition for every customer. I encourage you to try those things and give feedbacks. This is a great addition that will have an impact on productivity… and yes, also on doing demos for prospects

Original Post https://demiliani.com/2024/11/06/dynamics-365-business-central-project-yellowstone-is-here/