Why EV Insight?¶
Comparing Your Options¶
If you use Business Central, you have several options for analytics and reporting — from built-in features to fully custom solutions. This page compares the most common approaches.
At a Glance¶
| BC Built-in Reports | Custom BI Project | EV Insight | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Immediate | 3–12 months | Days |
| Multi-company | Single company | If built | Native |
| Multi-environment | If built | Native | |
| Multi-tenant | Rarely built | Native | |
| Historical data | Snapshot at import only | If built | Automated daily snapshots |
| Daily aging snapshots | Rarely built | Receivables & Payables | |
| BC Financial Reports in Power BI | Complex to replicate | Built-in | |
| Pre-built measures | ~10 basic | Custom per project | 156–216 depending on product |
| Dimensional model | Flat tables | Varies by consultant | Star schema |
| Custom reports | Limited | Full flexibility | Full flexibility |
| Custom data sources | Full flexibility | Extensible | |
| Ongoing maintenance | Microsoft managed | Customer responsibility | Managed by Elbek & Vejrup |
| BC version upgrades | Automatic | Manual rebuild risk | Managed — tested across versions |
Business Central Built-in Reports¶
Business Central includes embedded Power BI reports that connect directly to BC data via API pages.
What you get:
- Finance reports — Top Customers, Income Statement, Balance Sheet
- Sales reports — basic sales analysis
- Purchasing reports — basic purchasing analysis
- Inventory reports — stock levels and item tracking
Limitations:
- Single company only — Each report imports data from one company. No cross-company consolidation
- No historical snapshots — Data is imported as-is at the time of refresh. No tracking of how receivables or payables evolve over time
- Import-based — Data is imported into Power BI from BC APIs at refresh time, but without transformation or dimensional modeling
- Limited measures — Basic aggregations (sum, count). No profit margins, aging calculations, budget variance, or trend analysis
- No star schema — Flat, API-shaped data without dimensional modeling. Difficult to extend or combine across business areas
- No Financial Report rendering — Cannot replicate BC's row-definition-based financial reports (P&L, Balance Sheet) in Power BI
- No construction or project management analytics — No support for Tecto 365 or SBA specific reporting
Best for: Quick initial look at BC data with zero setup. Not suitable for cross-company analytics, historical tracking, or advanced financial reporting.
Custom BI Project¶
Hire a consultant or an internal BI team to build a Power BI solution from scratch against BC APIs or direct database access.
What you get:
- Full flexibility — any report, any visualization, any data source
- Tailored to your exact business processes
- Ownership of all code and logic
Challenges:
- Long delivery time — Typical projects take 3–12 months from requirements to production
- Dimensional modeling expertise required — Building a proper star schema from BC's normalized data structure requires deep understanding of both BC and data modeling best practices
- BC upgrade risk — When Business Central updates APIs or adds new fields, your custom solution may break. Ongoing maintenance is the customer's responsibility
- High initial cost — Custom development, testing, data modeling, and report design add up — especially for multiple business areas
- Ongoing maintenance — Schema changes, measure adjustments, and bug fixes require continued consultant or developer involvement
- Multi-company is hard — Consolidating data from multiple BC companies requires custom ETL logic, company-aware business keys, and careful isolation
- Financial Reports are complex — Replicating BC's row-definition-based financial statements (with dynamic totaling formulas) in Power BI is a significant engineering effort that few custom projects achieve
- No standard starting point — Every project starts from zero. Previous projects cannot be reused without significant rework
Best for: Organizations with unique requirements that cannot be met by a pre-built solution, and who have budget and capacity for ongoing maintenance.
EV Insight¶
A managed analytics product purpose-built for Business Central.
What you get:
- Pre-built semantic model with 156–216 DAX measures depending on product
- Star schema dimensional model — optimized for Power BI performance and usability
- Multi-company, multi-environment, multi-tenant — analyze across all BC companies, environments, and tenants from a single set of reports
- Historical data — daily snapshots for receivables and payables aging, budget tracking over time
- BC Financial Reports — row definitions rendered natively in Power BI for dynamic P&L and Balance Sheet
- Pre-built report pages — interactive reports for construction, project management, forecasting (EV Tecto Insight)
- Automatic BC version support — tested and maintained across BC versions by Elbek & Vejrup
- Custom reports welcome — the semantic model is deployed to your workspace. Build any custom report on top of it
- Custom expansion — support for integrating additional data sources beyond Business Central into the same analytics product
- Construction and project management — EV Tecto Insight adds contract management, WIP tracking, forecast & accruals, and piece work analytics for Tecto 365 users
How it differs:
- Days to production, not months — Pre-built models and automated extraction mean you go from requirements to reports quickly
- Maintained, not abandoned — Updates are deployed automatically. New BC fields and capabilities are added as the product evolves
- Your Power BI, your tenant — Reports are deployed to your organization's Power BI workspace. You control access and can extend freely
Making the Choice¶
| If you need... | Consider |
|---|---|
| Quick financial overview, single company | BC Built-in Reports |
| Cross-company finance, sales, purchasing, projects | EV Insight |
| Multi-environment or multi-tenant consolidation | EV Insight |
| Construction management with WIP and forecasting | EV Tecto Insight |
| Highly specialized reports for unique business processes | Custom BI project — possibly on top of EV Insight's semantic model |
| Zero maintenance, managed updates | EV Insight or EV Tecto Insight |
Combine Approaches
EV Insight and custom reporting are not mutually exclusive. The semantic model provides a production-ready data foundation. You can build unlimited custom reports on top of the pre-defined tables and measures — getting the best of both worlds.