Power BI Financial Dashboards for Malaysian Finance Teams: Connecting to Business Central

Best practice guide

Why Malaysian finance teams want live financial dashboards

For many Malaysian finance teams, month-end reporting still means exporting data from the accounting system into Excel, rebuilding pivot tables, and manually checking figures before circulating a profit and loss statement or a cash flow summary. This works, but it is slow, and by the time the report reaches a chief financial officer (CFO) or finance director, the underlying figures may already be a week or more out of date.

Finance teams running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central have an alternative: connecting Microsoft Power BI directly to Business Central data so that dashboards reflect the general ledger, sales, and purchasing records as they stand, rather than a static export. This does not remove the need for month-end close discipline or for a qualified accountant to review the numbers — but it does mean that once data is posted in Business Central, it is available for reporting without a separate manual extraction step.

This is a genuine reporting gap for many small and medium Malaysian organisations. Business Central includes built-in financial reports, but Power BI adds the ability to build custom visuals, combine data across companies or business units, and share interactive dashboards with people who do not have a Business Central licence.

How Power BI connects to Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft documents two main ways to bring Business Central data into Power BI, and organisations can use one or both depending on their reporting needs.

1. Pre-built Power BI apps for Business Central

Microsoft publishes ready-made Power BI apps for specific functional areas, including Finance, Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Manufacturing, and Projects. The Power BI Finance app includes reports such as Financial Overview, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Budget Comparison, Liquidity KPIs, Profitability, Liabilities, EBITDA, Average Collection Period, Aged Receivables, Aged Payables, and General Ledger Entries. Each app consists of an AL connector app (pre-installed with Business Central) and a Power BI template app that must be installed separately from Microsoft Marketplace and connected to a Power BI workspace.

For Business Central online, these reports source data from a secondary, read-only database replica as part of Business Central's "read scale-out" capability, which keeps reporting queries from competing with day-to-day transaction processing.

2. The native Power BI connector for custom reports

Where the built-in apps do not cover a specific reporting need, Power BI Desktop includes a native "Dynamics 365 Business Central" connector (and a separate on-premises connector for on-premises deployments). This connects to Business Central's API pages and OData web services, letting a report builder select specific data sources — such as customers, sales invoices, or general ledger entries — filter and shape the data using Power Query, and build a bespoke report. Microsoft notes that API pages generally perform better than older web services and are the recommended data source going forward.

Once built in Power BI Desktop, reports are published to the Power BI service and can then be embedded back into Business Central pages, viewed in the Power BI service directly, or shared with users through Power BI workspaces — including people who do not hold a Business Central licence but do have appropriate Power BI access.

What this means practically

For most Malaysian finance teams, the pragmatic starting point is the built-in Power BI Finance app, since it covers the core statements and KPIs without custom development. Custom Power BI reports built via the native connector are then layered on for organisation-specific views — for example, a dashboard structured around a Malaysian entity's own chart of accounts, dimensions, or a specific board reporting format.

Core financial dashboards a Malaysian finance team needs

Regardless of whether reports come from the built-in Power BI Finance app or a custom build, most Malaysian finance functions converge on a similar core set of dashboards.

Profit and loss (income statement)

A monthly or period-based income statement view, ideally compared month-on-month and against the same period last year. Business Central's Income Statement Power BI report supports comparing income statement accounts on a monthly basis. For Malaysian entities reporting under MFRS or MPERS, the underlying general ledger structure and chart of accounts should already reflect the applicable financial reporting standard — Power BI visualises what is posted, it does not change how figures are classified or measured.

Cash flow

Cash position and liquidity are consistently a top concern for Malaysian SMEs, particularly where working capital is tight. Business Central's Liquidity KPIs report tracks current ratio, quick ratio, and cash ratio over time, which — combined with bank balances and short-term receivables/payables data — gives finance teams an early warning view of liquidity pressure rather than discovering it at month-end.

Accounts receivable and accounts payable ageing

Ageing dashboards are one of the most commercially useful Power BI views for a Malaysian finance team, because they turn a static debtor or creditor listing into an interactive, drillable view. Business Central's Aged Receivables and Aged Payables Power BI reports categorise customer and vendor balances into ageing buckets, with the ability to age by document date, due date, or posting date, and to customise bucket size. This supports faster collections follow-up and clearer visibility of upcoming payment obligations — both of which matter for organisations managing Sales and Service Tax (SST) cash flow alongside trade receivables and payables.

Budget versus actual

Comparing general ledger actuals to budget on a month-to-month basis, with variances flagged, is core to management reporting. Business Central's Budget Comparison Power BI report is built specifically for this, comparing G/L budgets to actuals and highlighting variances so finance teams and department heads can identify where performance is diverging from plan.

A consolidated financial overview for leadership

For CFOs, finance directors, and boards, a single-page overview matters more than a detailed general ledger extract. Business Central's Financial Overview Power BI report — generally available from Business Central 2024 release wave 2 — is designed for exactly this audience, presenting KPIs including revenue, net profit, net profit margin, assets, days sales outstanding (DSO), days sales of inventory (DSI), and days payable outstanding (DPO) on one dashboard. This is the kind of view a CFO dashboard in a Malaysian context typically needs: enough detail to support a decision, without requiring the reader to interpret raw ledger data.

Data governance and a single source of truth

Connecting Power BI to Business Central raises a governance question that Malaysian finance teams should address before dashboards are rolled out widely, not after: who owns the semantic model, and how is it kept aligned with the general ledger.

One governed model, not many parallel reports. Where several people independently build their own Power BI reports against Business Central, small differences in filters, date logic, or dimension handling can produce dashboards that do not reconcile with each other or with the Business Central financial reports. A single, centrally maintained semantic model — with agreed definitions for figures such as revenue, net profit, or ageing buckets — helps keep reporting consistent.
Environment and company scope. Business Central supports multiple environments (for example, sandbox and production) and multiple companies within a tenant. Power BI connections should be deliberately scoped to the correct environment and company, and refreshed on a defined schedule, so dashboards do not inadvertently mix test data with live data or the wrong legal entity's figures.
Access control. Power BI workspace and row-level security should mirror who is entitled to see what — for example, restricting company-wide profit and loss detail to finance and senior management, while giving department heads visibility only of their own cost centres.
Reconciliation to the general ledger. Dashboards should be periodically reconciled back to Business Central's own financial reports and the statutory general ledger, particularly around month-end close, to confirm the Power BI model has not drifted from the source data.

None of this is unique to Malaysia, but it matters in a Malaysian context because financial statements and management accounts often need to align closely with MFRS or MPERS-based statutory reporting, and because SST and e-invoicing data flowing through Business Central adds further data points that a governed model needs to handle consistently.

Licensing overview

Power BI licensing is set, priced, and updated by Microsoft, and licensing terms are subject to change — organisations should confirm current pricing and options directly with Microsoft or a licensing partner before budgeting for a rollout. At a high level, Microsoft's model for accessing and sharing Power BI content includes:

Power BI Pro — a per-user licence generally required to publish, share, and collaborate on reports in the Power BI service, and required to view most shared content unless the organisation uses Premium capacity.
Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) — a per-user licence that adds Premium features (such as larger dataset sizes and more frequent refreshes) without requiring organisation-wide Premium capacity; anyone viewing PPU-licensed content generally also needs a PPU licence.
Power BI Premium / Fabric capacity — organisation-wide capacity-based licensing, where Microsoft's current direction is migrating dedicated Premium (P-SKU) capacity to Microsoft Fabric (F-SKU) capacity; at sufficient capacity tiers, viewers may not need an individual Pro licence.

Separately, installing a Power BI template app such as the Business Central Finance app requires a Power BI Pro licence, per Microsoft's own documentation. Malaysian finance teams should also budget for Dynamics 365 Business Central licensing itself, which is priced and licensed independently of Power BI.

Because Microsoft has changed Power BI pricing and packaging in recent years, and continues to evolve the Fabric capacity model, this article deliberately does not quote specific prices. Current, authoritative pricing should always be confirmed on Microsoft's official Power BI pricing pages or through a licensing conversation with Microsoft or an authorised partner.

A practical approach to building and rolling out dashboards

Malaysian finance teams adopting Power BI for financial reporting typically get better results from a staged rollout than from building every dashboard at once:

Confirm the Business Central data is reporting-ready. Chart of accounts structure, dimensions (such as department, project, or business unit), and posting practices should be consistent, since Power BI reports will surface whatever inconsistencies exist in the underlying ledger.
Start with the built-in Power BI Finance app. Installing the Finance app and connecting it to the correct Business Central environment and company gives a working baseline — Financial Overview, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Budget Comparison, Liquidity KPIs, and ageing reports — before investing in custom development.
Identify the two or three custom views that matter most. Rather than building an open-ended set of dashboards, most finance teams get more value from a small number of well-designed views tailored to how their board or management team actually makes decisions — for example, a cash flow view structured around the organisation's specific banking and facility arrangements.
Agree governance before wide rollout. Define who owns the semantic model, how refresh schedules work, and who can access which dashboards, before distributing reports beyond the finance team.
Reconcile and validate. Check dashboard figures against Business Central's own financial reports for at least one full close cycle before relying on Power BI as the primary reporting view for management or the board.

How SCSB helps

SCSB provides implementation and configuration support for organisations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Power BI in Malaysia. This includes setting up the connection between Business Central and Power BI, configuring the built-in Power BI Finance app, and building custom financial dashboards aligned with a client's chart of accounts, dimensions, and management reporting requirements. Our team also supports the data governance groundwork — semantic model structure, access control, and reconciliation practices — needed for dashboards to remain a reliable, single source of truth over time.

If your finance team is exploring live financial dashboards on Business Central, request a consultation to discuss your current reporting setup and what a Power BI rollout could look like for your organisation.

Microsoft, Power BI, Dynamics 365, Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Microsoft Fabric are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.