Many businesses operate on a quiet, informal system: Business Central holds the transactional data, but the actual analysis takes place in Excel—numbers are copied out, formulas are rebuilt, and formatting is done by hand. It works—until it doesn't: a broken link, an outdated export, or a formula error that nobody notices until a decision has already been made based on it.
It's rarely a matter of preference—it's usually because no one has had the time to set up a proper connection, and copy-pasting is the easiest option when under deadline pressure. The solution isn't to ask people to stop using Excel; it's to connect Excel directly to live data instead of manually recreating it.
Business Central supports real-time Excel integration—pulling filtered, refreshable data directly from BC into a spreadsheet, without the need for a manual export step. For teams that rely on Excel for ad hoc analysis, this alone eliminates a significant portion of the risk associated with copy-and-paste errors.
For anything that needs to be viewed regularly by more than one person, Power BI is a better solution than a shared Excel file—no version conflicts, no questions about "which copy is current," and it can pull data from Business Central, Excel, and other systems into a single connected model.
Before connecting anything, it’s worth doing a quick exercise: make a list of the reports your team currently creates manually, and note where the source data is actually located. Often, two or three of these account for most of the manual effort—and are the ones with the highest value to connect first.
Untangling data silos doesn't have to be a big-bang project—it usually involves just a few targeted connections that eliminate the riskiest manual steps first. [LINK: Reach out] if you'd like help mapping yours.
