Power BI is a robust and powerful analytics tool that can be connected to your Business Central system. By publishing OData feeds from Business Central, Power BI can consume them and pull the data into its analytics engine. These data feeds can be manually created by the end users, or they can be automatically published on the installation of a Business Central application.

When the data is pulled into Power BI, it can be manipulated and transformed so that it is in the right format and structure called for by your reporting requirements.

Once the data has been imported into Power BI, it becomes an offline data source, meaning that the data inside of Power BI needs to be refreshed in order to stay current. This is done in Power BI Desktop using the Refresh button on the Home tab.