Jet Reports Business Central: What It Does and Costs

By Lee Nash · 28 July 2026 · 7 min read

Jet Reports Business Central is an Excel-based reporting tool that pulls live data straight from Dynamics 365 Business Central into spreadsheets your finance team already knows how to use. If you spend your month-end copying figures out of BC, reformatting them, and praying the totals still tie by the time the board pack is due, this is the category of tool built for you. It is not a dashboard platform and it is not a data warehouse — it is refreshable, drillable, formula-driven reporting that lives inside Excel. Below is a straight account of what it does well, what it costs, and where it quietly falls short.

What Jet Reports actually is

Jet Reports (now sold by insightsoftware as Jet Reports, part of the Jet product family) is an Excel add-in. Once installed, you get a Jet ribbon and a set of functions — NL, NF, GL and friends — that go and fetch data from Business Central on demand.

The mechanics matter, so here is how it genuinely works:

• Function-driven pulls. You write a formula like =NL("Sum","Item Ledger Entry","Quantity",...) into a cell. When you refresh, Jet queries BC and drops the answer in. Because it is a formula, it recalculates against live data every time you run the report.
• Table-aware, not screen-scraping. Jet reads BC tables and fields directly (via the BC connector for SaaS, or SQL for older on-prem NAV). You reference tables and fields by name, so a report built once keeps working as the data changes underneath it.
• The Report Wizard. For people who don't want to hand-write functions, the wizard builds financial statements — P&L, balance sheet, cash flow — off your chart of accounts and account categories, with drill-down back to the transaction.
• Scheduling and distribution. The Jet Scheduler can run a report overnight, burst it by dimension (a branch pack per branch manager), and email out the results as Excel or PDF. This is the bit that turns a spreadsheet into an actual reporting process.

The headline benefit is that finance stays in Excel. Nobody learns a new BI front-end. You keep your formatting, your nested formulas, your pivot tables, and you bolt live BC data underneath them.

What it does well

1. Financial reporting off the chart of accounts. Structured management accounts with rows that map to account categories and columns for periods, budgets and variances. This is Jet's home turf and it is genuinely good at it.
2. Reports that survive change. Because you reference tables and fields, adding a new G/L account or dimension value doesn't break a well-built report — it flows through on the next refresh.
3. Drill-down for auditability. Click a figure, see the ledger entries behind it. That transparency is a real advantage over hand-keyed spreadsheets where nobody can trace a number.
4. Distribution without manual effort. Scheduled, bursted, emailed packs replace the "export, format, attach, send" ritual that eats a controller's morning.

What it costs

Be sceptical of any exact figure online — insightsoftware quotes per customer and doesn't publish a list price. But the honest posture is this:

• Licensing is annual subscription, per named user, typically in the region of £800–£1,500 per user per year, with volume and bundle discounts. There is no meaningful "free tier" for production use.
• Implementation is a separate cost. Expect a few days to a couple of weeks of consultancy to install, connect to BC, set up security, and build your core report set — often £3,000–£10,000 depending on how bespoke your statements are.
• Ongoing. Someone has to own the report library. Budget internal time, or a support retainer, for changes as your chart of accounts and reporting needs evolve.

So a small finance team should plan for a four-figure annual licence plus a one-off build, not a trivial add-on. That framing matters for the decision below.

What it doesn't do

This is the part most vendors skate over, so here it is plainly.

• It is not a data warehouse. Jet Reports queries BC directly; it does not store, stage, or reconcile history across systems. If you need a governed warehouse — multiple companies, multiple ERPs, years of snapshotted history, heavy transformation — that is Jet Analytics, a separate product. We cover the difference in detail in our guide to what Jet Analytics is and when you need it.
• It is not a real-time dashboard tool. There is no interactive, always-on visual dashboard the way Power BI gives you. Jet output is a spreadsheet you refresh. Charts exist, but this is reporting, not data visualisation at scale.
• It lives in Excel — with Excel's ceiling. Very large pulls are slow, and a badly built workbook with thousands of live functions will crawl. Jet rewards disciplined design; it punishes sprawl.

When you don't need Jet at all

Here is the point against our own interest, because you deserve it. A lot of teams don't need Jet Reports.

• If your requirement is standard financial statements, Business Central's own Financial Reporting (formerly Account Schedules) is built in, included in your BC licence, and perfectly capable of a P&L and balance sheet with budgets and dimensions. For many SMEs that is the whole job — no extra tool, no extra cost.
• If what you actually want is visual, shareable dashboards — KPI tiles, trends, something the MD opens on a phone — Power BI is the better and often cheaper answer, and it connects to BC natively.

Reach for Jet when your reporting is heavily Excel-shaped, needs complex row/column logic native BC reports can't express, and must be scheduled and distributed in volume. If that's not you, save the licence.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Jet Reports cost?

There's no public price list. Realistically, budget an annual per-user subscription in the £800–£1,500 range, plus a one-off implementation of roughly £3,000–£10,000 to install, connect and build your core reports. Get a written quote for your user count — bundle and volume discounts are common.

What's the difference between Jet Reports and Jet Analytics?

Jet Reports is the Excel reporting tool that queries Business Central live. Jet Analytics is a data warehouse and ETL platform that consolidates and stores data from BC and other systems for reporting on top. You can run Jet Reports on its own; you'd add Analytics when one live source and Excel's limits stop being enough. See our Jet Analytics explainer for the full comparison.

Jet Reports or Power BI — which should I use?

Different jobs. Jet is for Excel-native financial and operational reports with drill-down and scheduled distribution. Power BI is for interactive visual dashboards. Many finance teams end up running both: Jet for the statutory and management packs, Power BI for the at-a-glance KPIs.

Does Jet Reports work with Business Central SaaS (cloud)?

Yes. There's a dedicated connector for BC online that authenticates and reads your tables and fields, so cloud tenants are fully supported — you're not tied to on-prem NAV or SQL access.

Ready to talk it through?

If you're weighing Jet Reports against native BC reporting or Power BI, an honest half-hour usually settles it faster than a demo. We'll tell you if you don't need it. Talk to our team and we'll help you pick the reporting stack that actually fits your finance function.

© 2026 Amplio Solutions Ltd · Written by Lee Nash · Built by Amplio SolutionsFollow us on LinkedIn