In Short: Bringing Business Central Data into Fabric
Dynamics 365 Business Central holds your core financial, inventory, purchasing, and sales data. Microsoft Fabric is where you build your unified analytical data estate. The gap between them - if left unaddressed - means your BI team is either maintaining separate pipelines to Business Central or leaving that ERP data out of your analytics altogether.
Integrating Business Central with Fabric puts your ERP data alongside CRM, operational, and external data in OneLake, enabling the unified analytics and AI capabilities that source-by-source reporting cannot provide.
There are three primary integration paths: Dataverse link (if your Business Central is connected to Dataverse), native Fabric pipeline with the Business Central OData API, and Azure Data Factory. The right choice depends on your Business Central configuration.
Option 1: Dataverse-Linked Integration (Preferred)
If your Business Central environment is linked to Microsoft Dataverse, Fabric's native Dataverse connector provides the cleanest integration path. Dataverse exposes Business Central entities as tables that Fabric pipelines can query directly, with change tracking built in.
How it Works
Fabric's Dataverse connector queries Dataverse tables using the OData API. You configure a pipeline that reads Business Central entities - customers, vendors, invoices, purchase orders, inventory, and general ledger entries - into your Bronze Lakehouse layer. Incremental load uses Dataverse's change tracking timestamps, so only changed records are extracted on each run.
Authentication uses a Microsoft Entra ID service principal, consistent with your wider Fabric governance framework.
Limitations
- Requires Business Central to be connected to Dataverse (standard for Business Central online, but not always configured)
- Not all Business Central entities are surfaced through Dataverse by default
- Dataverse API throttling limits apply for high-volume extractions
Option 2: Business Central OData API with Fabric Pipelines
Business Central exposes its own OData v4 API, which Fabric pipelines can query directly without Dataverse. This is the right path if your Business Central is not linked to Dataverse, or if you need entities not surfaced through it.
You create a Fabric pipeline with a REST connector pointing at the Business Central OData API endpoint, authenticated via a Business Central service-to-service application registration in Microsoft Entra ID. Incremental loads filter on lastModifiedDateTime.
Standard Entities to Prioritise
- General ledger entries (financials)
- Customer and vendor ledger entries (AR/AP)
- Sales and purchase invoice headers and lines
- Item ledger entries (inventory movements)
- Dimensions (cost centres, departments, projects)
- Chart of accounts
For high-volume entities such as general ledger entries or item ledger entries, partitioned extraction by date range or company is recommended to avoid pipeline timeouts.
Option 3: Azure Data Factory
ADF has a native Dynamics 365 connector that can read from Business Central, delivering data to OneLake or ADLS Gen2. For organisations with existing ADF pipelines and a preference for ADF orchestration, this is viable. However, for organisations starting fresh with Fabric, the native Fabric pipeline approach is simpler and avoids managing a second orchestration platform.
Medallion Architecture for Business Central Data
Apply the same Bronze-Silver-Gold pattern regardless of integration method:
Bronze: Raw Business Central data as extracted, with source timestamps and extraction metadata. Never transform at Bronze - preserve the raw state for auditability.
Silver: Cleansed and conformed data. Handle nulls, standardise date formats, and resolve Business Central's company-based multi-tenancy by consolidating entities across multiple companies into unified dimension tables.
Gold: Business-logic-enriched tables. Apply your financial reporting logic - calculate accruals, apply dimension hierarchies, join Business Central financials with other sources such as CRM revenue data or operational costs.
Power BI Reporting on Business Central Data
Once Business Central data is in your Fabric Gold layer, Power BI semantic models built on Direct Lake provide the reporting layer. Standard use cases:
- Financial performance dashboards (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow)
- Accounts receivable and payable ageing
- Inventory turnover and stock level monitoring
- Budget vs actual variance reporting
- Dimension-based cost centre and department performance
The advantage of building these reports on Fabric-managed data rather than directly on Business Central is that your financial reports share the same dimension tables as your CRM, operations, and HR reports - enabling cross-domain analysis that source-by-source BI cannot produce.
Our Microsoft Fabric team integrates Business Central with Fabric as part of data estate consolidation and analytics modernisation engagements.
