Jet Reports Preise für Business Central: Leitfaden zur Verlängerung

The renewal quote lands in March or in October, it is one number with three lines under it, and somebody upstairs asks whether it is reasonable. You have no list price to check it against, because there is not one. So the question you can actually answer is not "what does Jet Reports cost" but "what does our Business Central reporting cost us in total, and how much of that is the licence". This post is a worksheet for working that out.

The short answer

Jet Reports pricing for Business Central is quote based. insightsoftware publishes no prices for Jet Reports or for Reporting Intelligence; every route on its product pages ends at a "Get Pricing" form or a discovery call, and the figures circulating on review and directory sites are unverified. So the only honest way to evaluate a renewal is to build your own total cost of ownership number: the quoted line items (Designer seats, Viewer seats, the Annual Enhancement Program, the scheduling component, and any Reporting Intelligence subscription), plus the costs that never appear on a quote (consultant days, hours lost to slow runs, hours lost to reports only one person can edit, and any infrastructure the tool needs). The worksheet below has all of them in one table, so you can fill in your own numbers before the call rather than during it.

Why there is no list price to look up

This is worth stating plainly, because it shapes everything else. On the Jet Reports product page, every pricing route is a "Get Pricing" link that resolves to a request form at insightsoftware.com/request-a-price. On the Reporting Intelligence page, three tiers are named (Essential, Professional and Upgrade) and none of them carries a price; the buy links go to a request form as well, now under a /lineos/ path following the September brand split. No trial is mentioned on either page.

That is a legitimate commercial choice, and plenty of enterprise software is sold that way. It has two consequences for you. You cannot benchmark your renewal against a public number, so you benchmark it against your own previous year and against vendors who do publish. And you should treat the per seat figures quoted on review sites and software directories as unverified. We are not going to repeat them here, and neither should the business case you put in front of your CFO. Ask for your own quote, in writing, itemised.

The line items that appear on a Jet quote

Four named components show up in insightsoftware's own public material, and they are the ones to insist on seeing separately.

Designer and Viewer seats. insightsoftware's Jet License Portal page describes customers updating "Designer and Viewer information as you need to", which confirms the two seat types are the unit of licensing. The number that matters at renewal is how many designer seats you are actually using, not how many you bought three years ago.

The Annual Enhancement Program. The same page carries a condition that is easy to miss: "Customers must be current on their Annual Enhancement Program (AEP) in order to access the portal." The AEP is therefore a live, named line item, not an optional support wrapper, and lapsing on it has administrative consequences beyond losing support. Ask what the AEP costs, what it is calculated on, and what it covers.

Reports Center. This is the scheduling and distribution layer, described on the Jet Reports product page as a "centralized reporting command center" that lets you "schedule reports to run and distribute automatically to stakeholders". If you rely on scheduled distribution, find out whether it is bundled or quoted separately, and whether the price moves with the number of recipients.

A Reporting Intelligence subscription, if it is quoted. This is the new one for 2026. insightsoftware launched Reporting Intelligence on 16 June 2026 and describes it on the Jet Reports page as "The Next Evolution of Jet Reports" for Business Central Cloud customers, adding "live KPI monitoring, threshold-based alerts, and AI-generated insights". The Upgrade tier is explicitly aimed at existing customers moving from Jet Reports or Spreadsheet Server. One detail in the Jet Reports 26.3.0 release notes of 16 September 2026 belongs in your renewal conversation: Reporting Intelligence admin and power user roles now map to a viewer licence in the Jet Excel add-in. If colleagues were given those roles during a trial, check that the people who need to design reports still can, and check what that mapping means for the seat count you are being quoted. For the full timeline of the 2026 renaming, including the Lineos brand and the Business Central extension rename, see our post on what the Jet Reports rename changes for Business Central.

The costs that never appear on any quote

This is where most reporting budgets actually sit, and it is the half of the worksheet your account manager cannot fill in for you.

Consultant days

Count the partner or consultant days you bought in the last twelve months for report building, fixing and performance tuning, including days spent on reports that were never finished, and price them at your actual day rate. If your answer is "we do not really buy consultant days, but Brian spends a week on it every quarter", that is still a cost; it is just paid in salary rather than invoice.

Hours lost to slow runs

A trial balance covering 360 accounts across 12 periods is 4,320 cells. In a function based add-in, each of those cells is a request, so the report waits on thousands of round trips and Excel is often unusable while it does. Time one full month end pack, from the click to the finished numbers, and multiply by twelve.

For an anchor on what this is worth when it goes the other way: AASK runs about 30 month end reports and saves 16 to 20 hours a month since moving to Exsion, which is between 192 and 240 hours a year for one finance team. The AASK case has the detail. Use your own hours rather than theirs, but use the same arithmetic. If you want the technical explanation of why per function execution behaves this way, we wrote it up in why Jet Reports feels slow and how to fix it.

Hours lost to reports only one person can edit

Jet separates Design Mode, where licensed designers create and edit, from Report Mode, which is what most colleagues receive. Changes made in Report Mode are lost when the report is run again. In practice this means a colleague who wants a different date range has to ask the person who built the report, and wait. Count the requests your reporting owner handles in a month, put twenty minutes against each including the interruption, and annualise it. Then ask a second question, which is harder: what would it cost you if that person left?

The infrastructure a tool needs

Some reporting tools read the ERP directly. Others copy your data into a separate reporting database, which means storage, a refresh schedule, somebody to check it in the morning, and a second place where your financial data rests. Price whichever yours does. A direct add-in that reads Business Central through its web services needs none of this, so that row is zero; a warehouse based design is not wrong, but it is not free either, and the cost usually lands in a different budget from the one you are defending.

The worksheet

Fill in your own figures. The example column uses placeholder amounts that are illustrative only. They are not Jet Reports prices, and they are not quoted by anybody. They exist to show the arithmetic and the relative weight of the rows, nothing more.

[[TABLE_START]]

Line item | Where the number comes from | Illustrative example only, not a price

Designer seats | Quote. Seats in use, not seats bought | 3 seats at 1,000 = 3,000

Viewer seats | Quote. Confirm what a viewer can and cannot do | 12 seats at 200 = 2,400

Annual Enhancement Program | Quote. Ask what it is calculated on | 1,080

Reports Center, scheduling and distribution | Quote. Bundled or separate | 1,200

Reporting Intelligence subscription, if quoted | Quote. Ask which tier and what it replaces | 0 this year, tier to be confirmed

Quoted subtotal | Sum of the five rows above | 7,680

Consultant days, report building | Last 12 months of invoices | 6 days at 1,100 = 6,600

Consultant days, performance tuning | Last 12 months of invoices | 2 days at 1,100 = 2,200

Internal hours lost to slow runs | Time one month end pack, multiply by 12 | 10 h per month at 60 = 7,200

Internal hours lost to single editor reports | Requests per month, 20 minutes each | 5 h per month at 60 = 3,600

Training and onboarding for new starters | Days per new finance hire | 1 day at 600 = 600

Reporting data infrastructure | Storage, refresh, monitoring. Zero for a direct add-in | 0

Unquoted subtotal | Sum of the six rows above | 20,200

Total cost of ownership, year 1 | Quoted plus unquoted | 27,880

Renewal uplift against last year | This year's quote divided by last year's | To be confirmed at renewal

[[TABLE_END]]

The point of the table is the ratio, not the totals. In the illustrative set above the licence is roughly a quarter of the real cost. That changes the conversation: negotiating ten per cent off the quote saves 768 here, while halving the hours lost to slow runs and single editor reports saves 5,400. Negotiate both, but know which one is bigger before you walk into the call.

One Business Central specific note while you are counting hours. If any of your reports read G/L Entry (table 17) over several years across several companies, check whether they are approaching the Excel worksheet limit of 1,048,576 rows, because the workaround people reach for is splitting the report, and split reports are where reconciliation hours go to die. We covered the alternative in the Excel row limit is not your limit.

Questions to ask your account manager at renewal

Send these in writing, and ask for the answers in writing.

1. Please itemise the renewal: designer seats, viewer seats, Annual Enhancement Program, Reports Center, and anything else, each with its own price.

2. How many designer and viewer seats are we currently licensed for, and how many have been used in the last 90 days?

3. What is the percentage change against last year's quote on a like for like basis, and what drives it?

4. What is the Annual Enhancement Program calculated on, what does it include, and what happens operationally if we let it lapse?

5. Is Reports Center included, and does its price change with the number of recipients?

6. Is a Reporting Intelligence subscription part of this quote? If so, which tier, what does it add, and does it replace or sit on top of our existing seats?

7. Since the 26.3.0 release maps Reporting Intelligence admin and power user roles to a viewer licence in the Excel add-in, how does that affect the seat count we are being quoted?

8. What is the multi year price commitment, and what is the cap on future increases?

9. What happens to our existing report library if we move to Reporting Intelligence, and will you demonstrate that on one of our own reports rather than a demo file?

10. What is the notice period for non renewal, what is the last date we can give it, and can we reduce seats mid term?

11. Which of the problems we raised in the last year (name them: report runtime, shared reports, row limits) does this renewal solve, and how?

Question eleven is the one that matters. A renewal is the only moment in the year when both sides are paying attention.

What the same worksheet looks like with a published price

The worksheet is hard to complete for Jet because half of it is only knowable after a sales conversation, and that is not the only model in this market. Exsion publishes its prices on a public pricing page, so the quoted subtotal can be filled in before anybody talks to a salesperson. As listed on 29 September 2026, there are three reporting plans, Controller Essentials, Multi Entity Control and Advanced Reporting Pro, each bundling a number of licences, with entry pricing from 245 euro per month; scheduled distribution through ExsionTime is a separate add-on starting at 95 euro per month. Check the page for the current figures before you build your business case on them, but the point stands either way: you can fill in that half of the worksheet on a Tuesday afternoon without booking a call.

Installation is from AppSource and takes about five minutes, with a 30 day trial, so the unquoted half can be measured rather than estimated: run one of your slowest reports during the trial and time it.

For the infrastructure row, Exsion Reporting reads Business Central through its OData web services and stores no data of its own, so there is no reporting database, no gateway and no overnight load to check. Permissions come from Business Central itself, running as the signed in user, so there is no second security model to maintain.

Two things should be said honestly in the same breath. Exsion has no AI insight layer and no KPI alerting, so if the Reporting Intelligence feature set is what you actually want, we do not have it. And Exsion is built for Business Central only, which is a limitation if you run more than one ERP. The fuller side by side is in our Jet Reports alternative for Business Central guide, and the wider market, including the vendors who do and do not publish prices, is covered in our roundup of Business Central Excel reporting tools.

When renewing Jet is the right decision

There are four situations where signing the renewal is the correct answer, and a worksheet that cannot produce that result is not a worksheet, it is an advert.

The first is a multi ERP estate. If Business Central sits alongside another ERP that Jet also reads, one reporting layer across both has real value that a Business Central only tool cannot match.

The second is a working scheduling and distribution setup. If Reports Center delivers your packs reliably every month and people depend on that rhythm, the switching cost is not just report rebuilding, it is a process everyone trusts.

The third is a deep library built by people who are still there. If your reports are fast enough, built by the people who use them, and the designers who maintain them are not leaving, then your unquoted subtotal is genuinely small and the licence is most of your cost. Negotiate the licence and stay.

The fourth is timing. If your renewal is three weeks away and you have tested nothing, renew for one year and run the evaluation properly with eleven months of runway. A migration decided under deadline pressure is how teams end up paying for two tools at once.

How to run this before your renewal date

Three weeks is enough. In week one, pull last year's quote and your consultant invoices, and fill in the quoted and consultant rows. In week two, measure rather than estimate: time one full month end pack, and count the report change requests your reporting owner handles. In week three, send the eleven questions, and in parallel trial at least one alternative and rebuild your single most painful report in it, so that when the quote comes back you are comparing two measured numbers rather than one number and a feeling.

While you are at it, Microsoft's page on managing extensions in Business Central shows where to check which reporting extension and version you actually have installed, which is a surprisingly common source of "we are paying for what, exactly".

Frequently asked questions

[[FAQ_START]]

How much does Jet Reports cost for Business Central? | insightsoftware does not publish prices for Jet Reports. Every pricing route on its product pages ends at a "Get Pricing" request form or a discovery call, and the same is true of Reporting Intelligence, whose three tiers are named without prices. Per seat figures found on review and directory sites are unverified, so request an itemised quote and compare it against your own total cost of ownership calculation.

What line items should be on a Jet Reports renewal quote? | Based on insightsoftware's own public material: designer seats, viewer seats, the Annual Enhancement Program, and Reports Center for scheduling and distribution, plus a Reporting Intelligence subscription if one is being proposed. Ask for each to be priced separately so you can compare like with like against last year.

What is the Jet Annual Enhancement Program? | The AEP is insightsoftware's annual programme for Jet customers. Its licence portal page states that customers must be current on their Annual Enhancement Program in order to access the portal, so it is a required line item rather than optional support, and it is worth asking what it is calculated on and what it covers.

Does Reporting Intelligence change my Jet licence count? | It may. The Jet Reports 26.3.0 release notes of 16 September 2026 record that Reporting Intelligence admin and power user roles are now mapped to a viewer licence in the Jet Excel add-in. If your team was given those roles during a trial or rollout, confirm that the people who need to design reports still can, and ask how the mapping affects the seats you are being quoted.

What are the hidden costs of Business Central reporting tools? | The costs that do not appear on a quote are usually larger than the ones that do: consultant days for building and tuning reports, internal hours lost while slow reports run, hours lost because only one person can edit a shared report, training for new finance staff, and the storage and maintenance of any reporting database the tool needs. A direct add-in that reads Business Central live has no infrastructure row; a copy based architecture does.

Should I switch reporting tools at renewal? | Only if the worksheet says so and you have tested it. If your unquoted costs are small, your reports are fast and your designers are staying, negotiate the licence and renew. If your renewal is weeks away and nothing has been tested, renew for one year and run a proper evaluation on your own reports with the time that buys you.

[[FAQ_END]]

By Thomas Werkhoven, CEO of Exsion365, registered accountant, previously group controller and CFO.