Forget Excel. Business Central Now Thinks Like an Analyst

You know the drill. You open Business Central, export a report, tidy it up in Excel, add a few filters, maybe a pivot table, and half an hour later you’ve got the insight you needed. Then someone updates the data in Business Central… and your Excel file is already out of date.

That’s exactly what Microsoft has solved with Analysis Mode in Business Central. It turns your list pages into mini dashboards where you can explore data on the fly.

Make Your Lists Work Like Dashboards

Let’s say you manage sales. You open your Customer Ledger Entries and switch on Analysis Mode. Suddenly, you can group customers by region, compare this year’s revenue to last year’s, or filter out low-margin deals – all right inside Business Central.

Or maybe you’re in finance. You can take Posted Purchase Invoices, sort vendors by price or delivery time, and instantly spot who’s costing you more than they should. Operations manager? Same story. Analyze items by stock levels or warehouse, add columns for dimensions, and you’ve just turned your data into a live performance report without a single export.

Safe to Explore, Impossible to Break

The best part? Nothing you do in Analysis Mode affects your actual data. You can test theories, slice numbers a hundred different ways, and it’s still perfectly safe. Business Central keeps the source records locked, so you can explore freely without fear of “accidental edits.”

What’s New in 2025

If you tried Analysis Mode when it first launched, it’s worth another look. In version 27 (2025 release wave 2), Microsoft has added:

• The ability to pull in fields from related tables – like adding customer info when you’re analyzing invoices.

• Better Power BI integration, so you can move between dashboards and BC data more smoothly.

• And it’s fully built-in now – no longer a preview feature or a hidden toggle.

Make sure your environment is up to date and the feature is enabled in Feature Management.

Practical Ways to Get the Most Out of Analysis Mode

If you often find yourself asking, “I just want to see which customers bring the most revenue, by region, without opening Excel…” then Analysis Mode is for you.

It’s perfect for:

• quick sales or finance comparisons,

• preparing reports for meetings,

• identifying outliers or trends,

• and answering those “Can you check this right now?” questions we all get.

For deeper trend analysis or big data sets, Power BI is still your best friend. But for day-to-day insights, Analysis Mode saves you from a lot of unnecessary clicks.

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