What is Jet Reports for Business Central?

Since 2002, Jet Reports has grown to more than 137,000 users across 10,000 companies in over 90 countries. That scale matters; it means most common reporting challenges for business users have already been solved in the product. When you run a revenue report by customer, reconcile your trial balance, or build a KPI dashboard, you are using patterns refined over decades.

Unlike generic reporting tools, Jet Reports understands the Business Central and NAV data model out of the box. Dimensions, charts of accounts, posting dates, and company entities are all available through a user-friendly interface. For example, a finance manager can drag-and-drop fields such as G/L Account, Global Dimension 1, and Posting Date to construct a month-end P&L in minutes.

Because it runs inside Excel, Jet Reports fits how finance teams already work. You keep familiar features like pivot tables, formulas, and conditional formatting, but remove the risky “export to Excel and re-key” steps, and this alone can cut hours from each monthly close.

Key benefits of Jet Reports for finance and operations teams

Jet Reports benefits finance and operations teams by turning Business Central and NAV data into refreshable, governed Excel reports. Instead of static exports, teams rely on live connections to the ERP, reducing manual work, errors, and version confusion while still using the spreadsheet environment they trust every day.

The first tangible benefit is speed. Month-end and quarter-end close often involve stitching together multiple exports from Business Central into one workbook. With Jet Reports, those workbooks become templates with live queries. Refreshing a consolidated P&L across companies becomes a 30‑second button click instead of a half‑day task.

Accuracy improves as well. When data is pulled directly from Business Central, you avoid copy‑paste errors, broken VLOOKUPs, and accidental overwrites. One Jet partner case study cited finance teams cutting Excel errors by over 50% after moving to governed templates based on Jet queries.

Visibility is another key advantage. Jet Reports enables visually rich dashboards and KPIs that highlight trends and anomalies—such as sudden margin erosion in a particular product line—without needing a BI specialist. Dashboards that once required IT can be designed and iterated by finance analysts using standard Excel charts supported by Jet’s dataset.

Finally, collaboration becomes simpler. Jet Reports allows you to publish reports to the web and mobile so stakeholders see the same numbers. A regional manager can open a sales performance report on a tablet and know it is tied directly to Business Central, not a local copy last updated weeks ago.

How Dynavics and Jet Reports work together to unlock better reporting

The Dynavics–Jet Reports partnership combines deep knowledge of retail and hospitality processes with a reporting tool purpose-built for Business Central. This means your Jet implementation is not just technically correct; it is aligned with the KPIs and processes that actually drive your business performance.

We specialise in Business Central for experiential retail and hospitality, warehousing and distribution, and manufacturing. We understand where margins are tight and transaction volumes are high. In these environments, reporting needs are specific. If we take reatail for example: daily store performance, basket analysis, voids and discounts, stock turns, and labour productivity are all critical. Jet Reports provides the reporting engine, and Dynavics brings the industry templates and data model expertise.

Because Dynavics already understands your Business Central and LS Retail setup, we can map your existing data structures to Jet quickly. For example, we can design a daily flash report that pulls revenue, footfall, average transaction value, and refund data at store level. Instead of building this from scratch, we adapt proven layouts used across similar customers.

This partnership also streamlines support. When a report returns unexpected numbers, the root cause might be the report design, the Business Central posting setup, or the way data is entered on the shop floor. Working with Dynavics as your Jet Reports partner means you have a single team who can troubleshoot across all three layers.

Real-world scenarios: From manual spreadsheets to automated insight

Jet Reports scenarios typically start from a familiar pain point: a critical report lives in someone’s personal Excel file, takes hours to update, and always seems slightly out of date. Jet turns these fragile workbooks into governed, refreshable assets connected directly to Business Central or NAV.

Consider period-end financial statements. Many finance teams export trial balances and transaction lists, then build P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements manually. With Jet, those same layouts become templates based on reusable functions, allowing you to filter by period, company, or dimension without rebuilding formulas each month.

Another common scenario is store or site performance reporting. In retail and hospitality, managers want daily or weekly views of sales, labour, and key KPIs. By combining Business Central, LS Retail, and Jet, Dynavics can help you produce a “manager pack” where each store manager opens the same template but automatically sees only their location’s data.

Jet is also used frequently for audit and compliance. You can design exception reports highlighting unusual postings, changes to master data, or transactions above certain thresholds. Jet’s strength lies in these operational and financial reports where detail and traceability matter.

Finally, leadership teams benefit from Jet-powered dashboards that surface KPIs in a simple, visual format. Think weekly revenue trends, stock cover, or average transaction value, all updated each time the workbook opens, without waiting for IT to publish new reports.

Jet Reports vs native reports and Power BI in Business Central

Jet Reports vs Power BI is not a question of which tool is universally better, but which is best for the job. Jet excels at detailed financial and operational reporting in Excel, while Power BI shines at interactive, visual dashboards and self‑service analytics across multiple data sources.

Native Business Central reports and account schedules are powerful but limited when users want flexible layouts or multi‑company consolidation. Jet extends this capability by exposing the underlying data in a way finance users can control. You might, for instance, build a multi‑company P&L with dynamic columns for each entity, something that is cumbersome in standard account schedules.

Power BI is excellent for executive dashboards and visual storytelling. However, many finance teams still need highly formatted statements that tie out exactly to the ledger. Jet’s cell‑level control in Excel makes it easier to produce board‑ready packs and detailed audit trails, while still enabling drill‑down to transactions.

In many organisations, the best approach is “Jet and Power BI,” not “Jet or Power BI.” Jet can supply curated datasets or Excel-based models that feed into Power BI for broader analytics. 

For Dynamics NAV customers considering migration to Business Central, adopting Jet now can also smooth the transition. Your key reports stay in Jet while the underlying data source switches from NAV to Business Central, reducing disruption for end users.

How to get started with Jet Reports through Dynavics

Getting started with Jet Reports through Dynavics involves three practical steps: scoping your reporting pain points, prioritising a small set of high‑impact reports, and rolling out governed templates and training so teams adopt the new approach quickly and confidently.

First, we help you identify where reporting slows the business down today. Typical examples include month‑end close packs, multi‑company consolidation, store performance reporting, and stock or margin reports. We document who uses each report, how long it takes to produce, and what “good” would look like with automation.

Next, we configure Jet Reports against your Business Central environment and build a pilot set of templates. A common starting point is a P&L by dimension (such as region or brand), a balance sheet, and a cash flow or working capital report. For retail and hospitality, we often add a daily or weekly trading summary to this initial scope.

Finally, we focus on adoption. That means hands‑on training for finance and operations users in Excel, clear ownership of each template, and sensible governance, so teams can create new reports without compromising data quality. Because Dynavics already understands your ERP setup, we can iterate quickly based on feedback.

Jet Reports has been proven across thousands of customers worldwide. By combining that track record with our sector expertise, you gain a practical, low‑risk way to modernise reporting while keeping Excel at the centre of your workflow.