​Power BI or Excel: an honest comparison for controllers

Your board wants dashboards. IT recommends Power BI. And you are sitting there with your P&L in Excel, because that is where you get it done fastest. The short answer: use Power BI for the strategic layer (enterprise-wide dashboards, multi-year trends, forecasting models shared with 100 or more users) and use Excel connected directly to Business Central for the operational layer (monthly P&L, cashflow, bank reconciliation, general ledger checks, consolidation). Roughly 80% of a controller's reporting sits in that second group. In this article Thomas Werkhoven, Director of Exsion365 and former controller at Van Wijnen and BAM, makes an honest comparison. Not to score points, but to help you choose.

Why is this the question every controller asks?

Power BI is everywhere. It is in every proposal, on every shortlist and in every IT presentation. And rightly so: for enterprise-wide analyses, predictive models and strategic dashboards, it is a strong platform.

But as a controller, you ask yourself a different question. You want to know: can I run my P&L tomorrow? Can I update my cashflow without calling IT? Can I finish a reconciliation before the auditor arrives?

Those are not BI questions. Those are reporting questions. And the difference is bigger than you would think. A BI platform answers "what is happening across the organisation"; a reporting tool answers "is this number right, and can I show the entries behind it before 5 pm".

Where does Power BI excel?

Power BI is built for analyses across large datasets. Think trend analyses spanning multiple years, dashboards that serve several departments, and visual overviews for the board and management. Microsoft documents the finance side of Business Central, including its Power BI reports, in its finance overview on Microsoft Learn.

If your organisation needs fixed dashboards managed by IT, where a hundred employees log in at the same time, Power BI is the logical choice. The platform does that well. Row-level security, scheduled refreshes and a semantic model that everyone shares are exactly what a board pack for 100+ viewers needs.

But that strength comes with a caveat: implementation takes months, costs tens of thousands of euros and makes you dependent on consultants for every adjustment. Want to add a column? That will be a change request. For a controller who needs a new cost-center split by tomorrow morning, that lead time is the whole problem.

Where does Excel with Exsion win?

For a controller's daily work, things look different. P&L reporting, cashflow overviews, bank reconciliations, general ledger checks: that is work you want to do quickly, flexibly and independently. In an environment you know.

Exsion Reporting connects Excel directly to Business Central through the API. You build your report once, refresh it with one click and instantly have up-to-date figures. No export, no copy-pasting, no IT ticket. There is no data warehouse, no Azure SQL replica and no gateway to maintain, and the add-in inherits your Business Central permissions, so a controller who may not see the payroll company in Business Central cannot see it in Excel either.

The numbers matter here. A refresh of 700,000 G/L Entry rows (table 17) completes in under five seconds and Excel stays responsive while it runs. If a P&L line looks wrong, Show Details opens Business Central filtered to the exact account and date range behind that cell. That is the part of the job Power BI was never designed for: the check, the correction, the reconciliation before the close.

At 4PS, they use exactly this combination. Arnold van der Werf, License Specialist at 4PS, describes it as follows: Power BI for the fixed dashboards, Exsion for everything where the controller needs to act quickly and independently.

Which tool for which report type?

This is how we see it. Not a marketing pitch, but an honest breakdown based on what we encounter in practice.

[[TABLE_START]]

Report type | Best choice | Why | In practice

P&L and monthly reporting | Exsion | Controllers want this in Excel. Always. | One-click refresh, own layout, done.

Cashflow and liquidity | Exsion | Power BI falls short here. Too rigid for cashflow. | Real-time data, own models, no waiting.

Bank reconciliation and ledger | Exsion | Quick checks without export. Widely used by clients. | Direct BC connection, drill-down to invoice level.

Consolidation (multiple entities) | Exsion Corporate | Excel-based, all entities in one report. | N+P Group consolidates 14 entities across NL and UK.

Strategic dashboards and KPIs | Power BI | Built for visual overviews at organisation level. | Suitable when 100+ users access the same dashboards.

Predictive analytics and trends | Power BI | Stronger for statistical models and large datasets. | For forecasting models and AI-driven analysis.

[[TABLE_END]]

Two rows deserve a comment. Cashflow lives in Excel because the model changes every week: a new payment term, a delayed project, a one-off tax assessment. In a semantic model each of those is a change request; in a workbook it is a cell. Consolidation lives in Excel for a similar reason. Eliminations and currency translation are judgment calls that a controller wants to see, adjust and document, which is what Exsion Corporate is built for.

What does this mean in practice?

Most controllers I speak with already have Power BI in their organisation. That does not need to change. Exsion does not replace Power BI. It complements it.

Where Power BI delivers the strategic layer, Exsion handles the operational work. Your monthly reporting, your cashflow, your reconciliation. The work you do every day, where speed and flexibility matter.

A client in the construction sector put it well: they use Power BI for board reporting, and Exsion for daily operational reports. What used to take three days now takes minutes. The same pattern shows up at Boro-Wide, where Business Central reporting went from days to minutes once the export step disappeared.

A practical split for one finance team

Picture a group with five Business Central companies. The CFO pack, viewed by 100 managers on a Monday morning, runs in Power BI on a nightly refresh. The controller's month-end file, with the P&L per company, the intercompany check and the bank reconciliation, runs in Excel from the live G/L Entry and Bank Account Ledger Entry tables (17 and 271). One person maintains both, and neither one blocks the other.

How does the 80/20 rule of thumb work?

For roughly 80% of your daily reporting needs, you do not need an enterprise BI platform. You need a reliable connection between your data and your Excel. Exsion delivers exactly that.

The remaining 20%, where you need enterprise-wide KPIs, forecasting models and visual dashboards, that is where Power BI is the right choice.

That is not a compromise. That is the right tool for the right job. If you want a wider overview of the options, including Jet Reports, Velixo and Cosmos, read our comparison of the 7 best Business Central Excel reporting tools in 2026.

Where do you start?

Look at your own reporting process. How much time do you spend per month on P&L reporting, cashflow and reconciliations? And how much of that could you refresh with one click if you connected Excel directly to Business Central?

At Exsion365, we build the first report together with you. Within five minutes the add-in is installed from AppSource. Within an hour you have your first working report. Without IT, without an implementation project. The 30-day trial is free and pricing is public, so you can put the two tools side by side on cost as well as on fit.

Curious what that looks like for your situation? Get in touch for a no-obligation demo.

Frequently asked questions

[[FAQ_START]]

Should a controller use Power BI or Excel for Business Central reporting? | Use Power BI for strategic dashboards, multi-year trends and forecasting that many users view, and Excel connected to Business Central for monthly P&L, cashflow, reconciliations and consolidation. Around 80% of a controller's reporting falls in the second group.

Does Exsion replace Power BI? | No. Exsion handles the operational reporting a controller does every day, while Power BI delivers the strategic layer. Partners such as 4PS run both side by side.

Why is cashflow reporting better in Excel than in Power BI? | A cashflow model changes every week, and in Excel that change is a cell rather than a change request to a semantic model. With a live connection to Business Central the inputs refresh with one click.

How long does it take to set up Excel reporting for Business Central with Exsion? | The add-in installs from AppSource in about five minutes and a first working report is usually ready within an hour, without IT or an implementation project.

Can Excel handle large Business Central datasets? | Yes. Exsion refreshes 700,000 G/L Entry rows in under five seconds and can load up to 25 million rows into a single PivotTable data model.

[[FAQ_END]]