Power BI Reporting: Transform Data Into Intelligent Decisions

Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence and data analytics platform. It connects to your data sources — financial systems, CRM, databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and more — and transforms that raw data into interactive dashboards, real-time reports, and AI-driven insights that anyone in your organisation can access and understand.

Rather than exporting data into spreadsheets and manually building reports, Power BI creates a live, connected view of your business that refreshes automatically. Teams across finance, sales, operations, marketing, and customer service can each have dashboards tailored to their specific KPIs, all pulling from the same trusted data sources.

Microsoft Copilot is now embedded in Power BI, allowing users to ask questions about their data in plain English and receive instant visualisations, summaries, and trend analysis — turning Power BI from a reporting tool into an always-on analytical assistant.

Microsoft offers Power BI in several tiers, each suited to different needs:

• Power BI Desktop — a free Windows application for building and authoring reports. It is used by report developers and analysts to design dashboards, but reports built here need to be published to share with others.
• Power BI Pro — a per-user licence (included in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, or available as a standalone add-on) that allows users to publish, share, and collaborate on reports via the Power BI web service. Every user who needs to view or share reports requires a Pro licence.
• Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) — extends Pro with additional AI features, larger data model sizes, more frequent refreshes, and paginated reports. Suited to organisations with advanced analytics needs.
• Power BI Premium (capacity) — a capacity-based licence that allows unlimited users within an organisation to view reports without individual Pro licences. Suited to larger organisations sharing reports broadly across the business.

Advantage helps you choose the right licensing tier for your use case and user base — avoiding overspend while ensuring everyone who needs access has it.

Power BI supports over 100 native data connectors out of the box, covering virtually every system a UK business is likely to use. Key connections include:

• Microsoft systems: Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, SharePoint, Excel, SQL Server, Azure SQL, Dataverse, Teams, and Microsoft 365
• Cloud databases: Azure Synapse, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift
• SaaS applications: Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and hundreds more via certified connectors
• Files and feeds: Excel workbooks, CSV files, JSON, XML, OData feeds, and REST APIs
• On-premise systems: SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, and other on-premise databases via the Power BI On-Premises Data Gateway

For organisations using Dynamics 365, the connection is native — Power BI reads directly from Dataverse with no export or middleware required, ensuring dashboards always reflect live system data.

Power BI integrates natively with both Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement because all three products share Microsoft's Dataverse data platform. This means:

• Business Central: Power BI reports can be embedded directly inside Business Central pages — so finance teams see live cashflow, aged debtors, purchase analysis, and budget variance dashboards without leaving Business Central. Microsoft ships a library of pre-built Business Central report templates that can be deployed and customised immediately.
• Customer Engagement (CRM): Power BI dashboards surface pipeline health, sales performance, case resolution rates, and customer satisfaction trends directly within the CRM interface. Sales managers can view forecast accuracy and opportunity scoring without switching applications.

Advantage specialises in building embedded Power BI solutions across both Dynamics 365 platforms — designing data models that combine financial, operational, and customer data into unified executive dashboards that span your whole business.

Yes — and for most businesses, this is one of the highest-value things Power BI delivers. Excel-based reporting has three fundamental problems: data is stale the moment it is exported, reports depend on individuals to refresh and redistribute them, and there is no guarantee everyone is working from the same version.

Power BI eliminates all three issues. It connects directly to your source systems and refreshes automatically on a schedule you define — hourly, daily, or in near real time. Reports are published once and accessed by everyone through a browser or the Power BI mobile app, so there is always one live version rather than multiple spreadsheet copies in inboxes.

Importantly, Power BI and Excel work well together — Excel remains a valuable tool for ad hoc analysis and individual modelling. Power BI is the right platform for shared, operational reporting and the dashboards that leadership and department heads rely on to run the business.

Microsoft Copilot is embedded across Power BI and significantly extends what non-technical users can do with data. Key Copilot capabilities in Power BI include:

• Natural language Q&A: users type a question in plain English — "What were our top five customers by revenue last quarter?" — and Copilot generates a visualisation instantly, without needing to build a report manually.
• Automated report creation: describe the report you need and Copilot generates a draft report structure with suggested visuals and layout based on the available data.
• Report page summaries: Copilot reads a dashboard and generates a written narrative summary of the key findings — useful for distributing insights to stakeholders who do not interact with interactive reports directly.
• Anomaly and trend detection: Copilot proactively surfaces unusual patterns in your data and explains them in plain language.

Copilot features in Power BI require Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) or Power BI Premium capacity licensing. Advantage advises on which tier is appropriate for your use of Copilot.

Standard Power BI reports are interactive, visual, and designed for exploration — users click, filter, and drill down. They are ideal for dashboards, KPI monitoring, and operational reporting where users want to interrogate data dynamically.

Paginated reports are designed for a completely different use case: pixel-perfect, print-ready documents where the layout must be precisely controlled across multiple pages. Think formal financial statements, invoices, purchase orders, or regulatory reports that need to look identical every time they are produced and must print cleanly.

Paginated reports are available in Power BI Premium Per User and Premium capacity tiers. Many organisations use both: interactive Power BI reports for day-to-day operational visibility, and paginated reports for formal documents and compliance outputs. Advantage designs both report types and advises on which is appropriate for each use case in your organisation.

Power BI is built on Microsoft's enterprise-grade cloud security infrastructure and includes several layers of access control:

• Workspace permissions: reports and dashboards are organised in workspaces with Admin, Member, Contributor, and Viewer roles — controlling who can build, edit, and view content.
• Row-level security (RLS): data-level controls that restrict what rows of data individual users see within a report. A regional sales manager, for example, can be restricted to seeing only their own region's figures within the same shared report.
• Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) integration: all authentication goes through your existing Microsoft identity platform, supporting single sign-on, MFA, and conditional access policies.
• Data sensitivity labels: Microsoft Information Protection labels can be applied to Power BI datasets and reports, extending your organisation's data governance policies into the analytics layer.

Advantage designs Power BI deployments with governance and security built in from the start — including workspace structure, RLS configuration, and sensitivity label policies — rather than retrofitting controls later.

Advantage provides end-to-end Power BI services for UK businesses, including:

• Reporting strategy and data model design — defining the KPIs, data sources, and architecture that underpin your analytics environment.
• Dashboard and report build — designing and building bespoke interactive dashboards for finance, sales, operations, marketing, and customer service.
• Dynamics 365 integration — embedding Power BI reporting directly inside Business Central and Customer Engagement pages.
• Paginated report development — building pixel-perfect formal documents and print-ready reports for finance and compliance teams.
• Microsoft Copilot enablement — configuring Power BI Premium Per User to unlock natural language Q&A and automated insights for your teams.
• Governance and security design — workspace structure, row-level security, and sensitivity label configuration.
• Training and user adoption — upskilling your team to build and maintain reports independently over time.
• Ongoing optimisation — as your business evolves, we evolve your reporting with it.

The best starting point is a Power BI Reporting Workshop with the Advantage team. We take time to understand your current reporting environment — what data sources you have, where the gaps and pain points are, and what decisions you need better visibility of — then show you how Power BI could address those needs within your existing Microsoft environment.

You can request a workshop via our contact page, call us on 020 3004 4600, or email hello@advantage.co.uk. Whether you want to replace spreadsheet reporting, embed analytics in Dynamics 365, or build a full cross-business intelligence platform, we will help you build a clear and prioritised plan.