New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1: Use Enhanced Financial Reporting Capabilities

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 3rd of the new functionality in the Reporting and data analysis section is use enhanced Financial Reporting capabilities.

The no-code Financial Reporting feature offers significant benefits to finance departments by enabling self-service financial reporting and statements without the need for developer assistance. The enhancements in the release wave boost productivity by allowing report viewers to hide empty rows, and report owners to document usage, write introductory and closing paragraphs, save and run reports using Excel templates, and schedule report runs. Additionally, administrators can see required permissions and access telemetry for report usage and lifecycle events.

Overall, these improvements streamline financial reporting processes, saving time and resources while improving accuracy and accessibility.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

In this release wave, Microsoft have enhanced the Financial Reporting feature with capabilities for report viewers, report authors, and administrators.
Financial report viewers can:

• Choose to hide empty rows when they view a financial report.

Financial report owners can:

• Document the use of the report (using an internal description field).
• Write introduction and closing paragraphs for their reports.
• Save their Excel templates in Business Central.
• Run a financial report using a saved Excel template.
• Schedule when to run a financial report.
• Use a new Month to Date column type.
• Find financial reports that use a column or row definition.
• Use an accounting format where negative numbers are formatted with () instead of a minus sign.
• Open financial reporting when they create a new G/L account.

Administrators can:

• Use the documentation to find out which permissions are needed to run or edit financial reports.
• Get telemetry on the use of financial reports and lifecycle events.

My Opinion

On the surface many of these enhancements sound good, but with many end-users using Jet Reports or other reporting tools, I’m not sure how much use of them there will be?