Business Central reports without waiting on Power BI or a Jet license.
Tau reads Business Central through its OData V4 endpoints, keeps a queryable copy in sync every minute, and turns it into printed statements, dashboards, matrices, and scheduled deliveries. On-premises, it reads the SQL Server database directly.
Where Business Central reporting gets expensive.
Business Central ships with hundreds of report objects, and changing one means an AL developer, an extension, and an RDLC or Word layout that fights every adjustment. The built-in Excel layouts help, but they are not a paginated document with page numbers and group totals.
So most teams bolt on a second tool. Jet Reports is capable but lives in Excel and is licensed per seat, and the workbook is the report. Power BI needs a data model, refreshes on a schedule, is licensed per viewer, and does not print a three-page customer statement. Both take you out of the browser your users are already in.
The API and OData endpoints that everything else depends on are page based. Queries are paged at a few thousand rows, throttled per environment, and slow to filter ad hoc, so building a report that hits the API on every open is neither fast nor polite to the tenant.
What Tau reads from Business Central, honestly.
Tau connects to Business Central online or on-premises. Online, it uses the standard OData V4 API pages or any web service you publish from a page or query. Instead of hitting the API every time a report opens, Tau keeps a local mirror: a queryable copy of the entities you choose, refreshed by polling every minute, and updated by webhooks (API subscriptions) as soon as Tau has an HTTPS address. Reports query the mirror, so opening a dashboard costs Business Central nothing.
On-premises, Tau connects to the SQL Server database behind Business Central with a read-only login and reads the tables directly. A single report can combine several companies, several environments, or Business Central with the SQL Server behind the system you are migrating from, which is the situation most Business Central customers are in for at least a year.
Runs on your server. One service on Windows or Linux, or a container. A read-only login. Reports are plain files with version history. Nothing leaves your network unless you schedule a delivery.
Reports Business Central teams build first.
The demo runs on Northstar Coffee, an invented company in a real database. It shows the same report types below on sample data, not on Business Central.
Customer statement
Header, invoice detail, payments, and aged buckets in bands with page N of M, bursted as one PDF per customer on the first of the month.
See this report type in the demo →Sales by item category matrix
Item categories down the side, months across the top, quantity and amount in each cell, with a right-click drill to the posted sales lines.
See this report type in the demo →Open purchase orders by vendor
Grouped by vendor with expected receipt dates and outstanding quantity, delivered as Excel that still adds up to purchasing every morning.
See this report type in the demo →Inventory by location dashboard
Quantity on hand, on order, and reserved by location and item category, with the aging of stock that has not moved.
See this report type in the demo →Tau and Business Central: the questions we get asked.
Does it work with Business Central online and on-premises?
Yes. Online, Tau reads through OData V4 API pages and web services and keeps a local mirror. On-premises, it can read the SQL Server database directly, or use the same OData path.
How fresh is the data?
The mirror polls Business Central every minute. When Tau runs on an HTTPS address, it also registers webhooks so changes arrive as they happen. Every report shows when its data was last refreshed.
Will reports hit the Business Central API limits?
Reports never query Business Central directly; they query the mirror. The mirror syncs on a steady one-minute cadence, so the load on the tenant is predictable regardless of how many people open reports.
See it on your Business Central data.
Tell us how you run Business Central and the one report you wish you had. We will build it with you, live, and tell you plainly how Tau would connect.