Business Central reporting may be moving into cloud tools, dashboards and AI-assisted workflows, but many finance teams still start with Excel.
That creates an opening for Microsoft Partners working with Dynamics 365 Business Central customers. Exsion365, a Netherlands-based company with roots in the Navision market, is one example of how that opening is being packaged for the channel.
Its flagship product, Exsion Reporting, connects Excel to Business Central so finance users can build and refresh reports using ERP data. The company says the product can pull data from Business Central tables, refresh reports in Excel and follow the user’s Business Central permissions.
For Elielma Silva, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Exsion365, the appeal starts with the way controllers already work.
“As a previous controller myself, I know that I opened Excel every day even to think,” Silva said during an interview with PartnerTalks.
Business Central reporting as discovery work
Silva said Partners are central to Exsion365’s growth because they understand the customer’s Business Central implementation and the reporting requirements around it. That can become especially important during a new deployment, when customers are still learning what they need from ERP data.
As reports are built, customers may realize they need additional fields, customizations or different ways to view operational information. For implementation teams, those reporting conversations can expose requirements that might not surface in a standard discovery session.
“They start reporting on a new implementation of Business Central where the customers are still also learning a little bit about it,” Silva said. “And then they are like, “Oh, maybe we can add these fields or maybe we can do this customization.””
That makes Business Central reporting a discovery tool. It can show how a customer reads the business, which data points matter and where the system may need to be configured or extended.
Excel still shapes finance workflows
Silva pointed to construction and manufacturing as common use cases.
Construction companies often need to report by project, location or entity. Manufacturing companies can face high transaction volumes that make reporting more complex.
Those examples fit a broader pattern in the Business Central ecosystem. As PartnerTalks has reported on Business Central cloud reporting, finance teams and executives often need reporting capabilities that go beyond the ERP’s standard outputs.
That does not mean every customer wants the same reporting layer. Some will move toward Power BI or cloud-native analytics. Others will continue to rely on Excel because it remains familiar, flexible and widely understood by finance staff.
For Partners, the question is how to turn that reality into structured services work.
Business Central reporting can support requirements discovery, report design, user training and post-go-live support. In project-heavy or transaction-heavy accounts, it can also give Partners a clearer view of where customers struggle after the ERP is in place.
Exsion365 is also working on interface improvements and testing AI functionality inside Exsion Reporting, though Silva said that work remains in early stages.
For now, Business Central may hold the data, but Excel remains the working surface for many controllers. For Microsoft Partners, the opportunity is to make reporting part of the implementation conversation from the start.
