Your Numbers, live, inside Business Central
Advanced Spreadsheetsand Reporting
The app that turns Business Central into your reporting workbench – live spreadsheets, financial reports, budgets and dashboards, without ever exporting to Excel
The easiest way to see, report and plan on your Business Central data
Build sheets on live Business Central data, run financial reports on any table, maintain budgets in a grid, type journal lines and document lines straight into cells, and let the built-in AI agent assemble the dashboard while you watch. No exports, no stale snapshots, no waiting for someone else to build the report.
Spreadsheets on live data
A full spreadsheet editor inside Business Central. Regions bind cells to tables, financial reports, budgets, queries, pivots and SQL – re-read on every recalculation, so the sheet is never out of date.
Financial reports beyond the G/L
Extend the standard Financial Reports with indicator rows that pull from any table: open orders, receivables, inventory, headcount. Cross-company rows and columns with automatic currency conversion.
Video guides
Easy-to-follow video guides to help you fully utilize all features and functionality. Whether you are a controller or an administrator, our tutorials walk you through every region type, slicer and formula, so you can build with confidence.
AI-built dashboards
Describe the dashboard you want – “revenue, margin and margin % as KPI cards, monthly revenue as a chart, top items in a table, with an item and a period slicer” – and the Spreadsheet Agent builds it on your real data, live, while you watch.
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The Spreadsheet Business Central Always Deserved
Finance runs on spreadsheets. The trouble was never the spreadsheet – it was the export. The moment the data left Business Central it started going stale, lost its drill-down, and could never write anything back. Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting puts the spreadsheet where the data lives. Cells, formulas, formatting, fill handle, copy and paste from Excel – all the habits you already have – on top of regions that stay connected to the live ledger. Ctrl+click any number and the entries behind it open. Pick a period in a slicer and the whole sheet recalculates.
Live data regions
Bind a rectangle of the sheet to a table, a financial report, a G/L budget, a query, a report, a SQL statement, a pivot cross-tab, a date range, a FlowField or an image. More than a dozen region types, every one of them filled from Business Central on recalculation – never pasted in.
Slicers that drive the whole sheet
Turn any cell into an interactive filter: a period picker with presets like This Month, Year to Date and Last Year, a dimension picker, a date, a fixed list, or a lookup on any table – customer, item, salesperson. Point region filters at the slicer cell and one pick refilters every region, chart and KPI card on the page.
Charts and KPI cards, right on the grid
Column, bar, line, area, pie, donut and waterfall charts drawn from cell ranges. KPI cards for headline figures – value, comparison, delta, trend sparkline, target bar or status – styled from one colour scheme the sheet remembers. Page regions turn any part of the sheet into a preview tab and a printed page.
Write-back, validated by Business Central
Editable table regions, budget matrices, journal batches and document lines. Type a value and it is validated through the same business logic as the standard page – account lookups, price calculation, dimension checks – then written to the record. A formula in a cell keeps writing its result back on every recalculation.
Formulas with the full power of AL
Formulas are AL expressions, so anything the language can evaluate works in a cell – plus the familiar SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, PRODUCT and XLOOKUP, ledger functions like GL.GLSum and GL.GLBudget, and your own per-sheet procedures in Init Code. Region IDs become record variables: =CUSTOMERS.Count, =SALES.TableSum("Amount").
Your AI dashboard builder, built in
The Spreadsheet Agent sits beside the sheet as a chat panel. It reads your real data model, creates regions, wires slicers, styles cards and charts, and fixes a failing filter or SQL statement on its own. It works from a library of proven dashboard patterns – and can save the conventions you teach it for next time.
Fits Business Central like a glove
Open as Spreadsheet from Financial Reports, G/L Budget Names, every general journal and every sales or purchase document. Sheets are Business Central documents with their own permissions, a dedicated Spreadsheet Role Center, browser printing by page, and a one-click Export to Excel with native tables and charts when someone really does want a file.
Advanced Financial Reporting
Cross-Company Reporting
No more juggling multiple windows or exporting data into spreadsheets for each company.
With Advanced Financial Reporting, you can easily create column or line definitions that pull data from multiple companies into a single financial report.
Compare performance and consolidate key metrics from across your organization at a glance.
Access Any Data in Business Central
Your financial reports don’t have to be limited to the General Ledger.
Effortlessly include KPIs from inventory, production, sales, or any other area in Business Central.
Our Indicators feature makes it simple to specify exactly which table, column, and filters you want, allowing you to mix operational and financial data in a single, coherent report.
Automated Report Distribution
Save time and ensure your team stays on track with scheduled and fully automated report distribution.
Email a P&L statement to your board, upload monthly results to SharePoint for the entire organization, or share updates with external stakeholders—automatically.
Simply configure once, set up in the job queue, and let the app do the rest.
Expose Your Reports via API
Leverage the power of Power BI and other analytics tools by exposing your financial reports through a secure API.
With just a few clicks, accounting teams can build and maintain the core financial calculations, then hand over the report endpoints to BI experts for polished dashboards.
This separation of duties ensures data integrity and elevates data-driven decision-making across your business.
Standard BC vs. Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting
| Key Features | Standard Business Central | With Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Financial reports on G/L accounts | ✅ | ✅ |
| Report rows from any table (open orders, receivables, inventory, counts) | — | ✅ |
| Multi-company rows and columns with currency conversion | — | ✅ |
| Reusable indicator library | — | ✅ |
| Scheduled distribution by email, SharePoint or zip (PDF, Excel, Word, HTML, XML) | — | ✅ |
| Financial report data as OData APIs for Power BI | — | ✅ |
| Live spreadsheet editor inside Business Central | — | ✅ |
| Interactive slicers, drill-down, charts and KPI cards | — | ✅ |
| Editable budget matrix with write-back | — | ✅ |
| Journal and document lines as editable sheets | — | ✅ |
| Pivot, SQL, query and report regions | — | ✅ |
| AI Spreadsheet Agent | — | ✅ |
| Per-sheet permissions and Spreadsheet Role Center | — | ✅ |
| Export to Excel with native tables and charts | — | ✅ |
Ready to try it?
You can use the trial version of the Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting app in your Sandboxes.
Try all the features in the App to see how you can enhance your financial insights.
Done testing?
When you are sure the Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting app is the right choice for your business, you can buy a yearly license and use it in your production environment.
Advance Spreadsheets and Reporting
The license covers both production and sandbox environment(s) for one tenant.
USD 999/year
Key features that let you report, plan and see
Spreadsheets on live Business Central data
A saved sheet is a Business Central document, not a file. Its regions re-query the database on every recalculation, so opening the sheet is running the report. Columns to ZZ, a million rows, and only the cells you actually use are stored.
Open anything as a Spreadsheet
Select a Financial Report and choose Open as Spreadsheet: a ready-made interactive sheet appears with a title, a period slicer and one slicer per report dimension, all wired to the report below. The same action on a G/L Budget opens an editable accounts-by-months matrix. Every general journal and every sales or purchase document has it too.
Budget entry the way controllers want it
A budget matrix region shows the chart of accounts down and the periods across. Type an amount and it is written to the budget entries immediately. Show last year’s actuals beside every cell, spread an annual total across the months weighted by last year’s seasonality, unfold each account into one line per department, and share the sheet at the Edit Budget Entries level so managers can type their numbers and nothing else.
Connect fields between tables
You can activate a Field Transfer if the same is added to multiple tables.
Example: If a field is added to both the customer and the sales order, then you can activate a field transfer to have the field on the sales order be filled out with the value from the customer you select.
Expose data as web service APIs
Microsoft is telling everybody to stop exposing pages as web services and instead use APIs. But there’s no easy way to expose data as API without writing code.
The Simple Object Designer enables you to expose data as true APIs and get all the benefits of an API without writing any code.
Add new features to BC
A feature is data, with user-interface and business logic, all bundled together to extend Business Central to fit your needs. Specify what fields and functionality you want and watch the Object Designer create it for you.
Journal and document lines in a grid
A G/L Journal region puts a journal batch on the sheet with the same columns as the General Journal page. Sales Document and Purchase Document regions do the same for a document’s lines. Edit a quantity and the line amount, VAT and document total follow; type into the blank row at the bottom and a new line is inserted with the page’s own defaults.
Drill-down on every number
Ctrl+click a cell in a table region and the record’s card opens. Ctrl+click a financial report amount and the ledger entries behind it appear, filtered to the current slicer picks. Pivot totals open exactly the entries they sum. The drill follows the data, even under a formula.
Pivots, SQL, queries and reports as regions
Group any table into a cross-tab – sales by salesperson by month, items by location – with date buckets, sorted totals and a second grouping level. Run a SELECT statement, a query object or a report’s dataset and land the result on the sheet as cells you can compute on.
Slicers and cell-driven filters
Feature – Slicers and cell-driven filters
Any region filter can reference a cell: `WHERE(Posting Date=FILTER([C2]))`. Put a period slicer in C2 and every region that mentions it follows. Date Range regions build a monthly axis from the same slicer, so time-series charts move with the period picker instead of hard-coded dates.
Templates, scenarios and a colour scheme that remembers
Save any rectangle of a sheet – cells, regions, formats, init code – as a template and stamp it onto any other sheet from a visual gallery. Capture assumption sets as named scenarios (Base, Stretch, Worst Case) and flip between them in the review meeting. One base colour per sheet keeps every card and chart on the same story.
Share with exactly the right people
Per-sheet permissions for users, security groups or everyone: Owner, Read Only, Read Only (No Print), or Edit Budget Entries. Read-only users land in a polished preview where page regions are tabs and slicers still work. A read-only permission set blocks write-back across the board. Administrators can recover orphaned sheets but never silently read restricted ones.
Put any table on a Financial Report
Indicator rows extend the standard row definitions with Lookup, Sum, Count, Min, Max and Average over any table – open sales orders, order backlog, receivables past due, bank balances – filtered by dimensions and by the column’s own period. Test each indicator from its card with a date range and see the elapsed time. A downloadable indicator library gives you a proven starting set.
Multi-company reports and consolidation
Set a company on a row or on a column. Rows for US, EU and UK revenue with a total below; or the same rows across three company columns with a total to the right. Amounts from a company with a different local currency are converted with the reporting company’s exchange rate. Spreadsheet regions have the same Company setting, so one sheet can put several companies side by side.
Report distribution on a schedule
Define print jobs – which report, which relative date range, which dimension filters, which format – and let the Job Queue deliver PDF, Excel, Word, HTML or XML by email or to SharePoint every month, week or day. Explode one job into one per department with a click.
APIs for Power BI and everything else
Calculated financial report lines are published as OData APIs in 12- and 24-column variants, selected by date formula or by explicit date filter. Point Power BI, Excel or your own application at the endpoint and get the same numbers the report shows.
How is it actually working?
The spreadsheet engine runs inside Business Central on top of Hougaard’s AL Compiler and Interpreter, so every formula is real AL evaluated on the server against live data, with your permission sets applied. Nothing is exported, cached in a file or sent anywhere. The Spreadsheet Agent uses the AI provider you configure through Hougaard’s AL AI Services; without one, the editor simply has no chat panel.
Your questions answered
FAQ
How do I get started with Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting?
Install the app from AppSource, search for Spreadsheets and choose New Blank Sheet – or open the Financial Reports page, select a report and choose Open as Spreadsheet.
After installing, how do I start it?
Search (Tell Me, Alt-Q) for Spreadsheets to see your sheets, or Spreadsheet to open the editor. Terms like excel, sheet, formula and calc find it too. The Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting menu page collects the spreadsheets, print jobs, indicator library and setup in one place, and the Spreadsheet Role Center opens straight onto a sheet of your choice.
Will one license work in both production and sandbox environments?
Yes. One license covers production and sandbox environments for one tenant – and Business Central Online sandboxes need no key at all.
Does it work on-premises as well as in the cloud?
Yes. Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting runs on Business Central Online and on-premises. On-premises you publish and install the app and its two Hougaard dependency apps with the Administration Shell; on-premises sandboxes need a license key.
Which version of Business Central do I need?
Business Central 2026 release wave 1 (version 28) or later.
Does it work in all countries and regions of Business Central?
There are no limitations on localization. Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting works on all localized versions of Business Central.
Will it be in my language?
The app is currently available in Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
Is this a replacement for Excel?
For reporting on Business Central data, yes – the sheet stays connected, drills down, and writes back, which a file never can. When someone needs a file, Export to Excel produces a workbook with real values, number formats, styles, native Excel tables, and native Excel charts. The editor also ships with a Cheatsheet for Excel Users that maps your habits to their equivalents.
Are the formulas the same as Excel’s?
Formulas are AL expressions, so anything Business Central can evaluate works in a cell. The familiar SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, PRODUCT and XLOOKUP are there, along with ledger functions like GL.GLSum and GL.GLBudget, and you can define your own procedures per sheet in Init Code. Copy and paste to and from Excel works as you expect.
Can users change data from a spreadsheet?
Only where you allow it. Table regions, budget matrices, journal regions and document regions can be made editable; every edit runs the same validation as the standard page before it is written. Regions reading another company are always read-only, and the AFR_READONLY_Hgd permission set blocks write-back entirely for users who should only look.
Who can see my spreadsheets?
A sheet with no permission rows is open to everyone; the first save makes you its owner and from then on only listed users, security groups or “Everyone” rows have access – as Owner, Read Only, Read Only (No Print) or Edit Budget Entries. Administrators see every sheet in the list but cannot open a restricted one.
Does the AI agent require anything special?
You bring your own AI provider and enter its endpoint, key and model once in the AI Provider setup; usage is billed by your provider under your own agreement. The spreadsheet editor works fully without an AI provider – you simply do not get the chat panel.
Does my data leave Business Central?
No. Sheets, regions, formulas and reports are calculated and stored inside Business Central. Only if you turn on the Spreadsheet Agent are the sheet contents and the data it reads sent to the AI provider you configure. The license check sends your tenant id, environment name and registration key to Hougaard’s license server, and nothing else.
Can I move a spreadsheet between companies or environments?
Yes. Export any sheet as a single `.bcsheet` file – cells, regions, conditional formats, scenarios, init code, sizes and colour scheme – and import it elsewhere under the same or a new code. Permissions stay behind, since user and group names belong to the environment they came from.
Do my existing Financial Reports still work?
Exactly as before. The app adds fields to row and column definitions – Company, indicator, formula behavior – and leaves everything else untouched. Reports that do not use the new fields render exactly as they did.
What about report distribution – do I need anything else?
Email delivery uses any Business Central email connector (Microsoft 365, Current User, SMTP). SharePoint delivery requires the separate Hougaard SharePoint companion app. Scheduling uses the standard Job Queue.
What about updates?
The app is getting regular updates all the time. You can force the update from the Admin Center (select the environment and open “Apps”). App upgrades refresh the agent’s bundled dashboard patterns and leave your own skills alone.
What happens if I unsubscribe or don’t renew my license after a year?
Two weeks before expiry you see warnings inside the app. After expiry the license-gated features stop – indicator rows return zero and the API endpoints report no active license – until a new key is registered. Your saved spreadsheets, report definitions and print jobs are never deleted.
Supported Editions
This app supports the Essential and Premium editions of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
This app supports on-premises Business Central deployments
Supported Countries
This app supports all countries where Business Central is available
Supported Languages
The app is available in Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch (Belgium and Netherlands), English (all areas), Estonian, Finnish, French (all areas), German (all areas), Icelandic, Italian (Italy and Switzerland), Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish (Spain and Mexico) and Swedish.