Business Central integrations with the Power Platform and Microsoft 365
How Business Central plugs into Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.
A big part of Business Central's value is that it lives inside the broader Microsoft cloud rather than as a standalone island. The connections are mature, well-documented, and — for the most part — work out of the box.
Power Automate. A first-party Business Central connector for Power Automate covers most standard tables and the most common operations: create/read/update records, trigger on changes, run actions. Approval workflows in Business Central can themselves be powered by Power Automate, replacing or extending the built-in workflow engine. Watch out for API call limits on the tenant — they're generous but real, and chatty flows can hit them.
Power Apps. Canvas apps and model-driven apps consume Business Central data through the same connector. The standard pattern is to keep transactions in Business Central and use Power Apps for purpose-built front ends — warehouse scanning, expense capture, customer onboarding.
Power BI. Business Central ships pre-built Power BI apps for finance, sales, purchasing, and inventory. For deeper analytics, the Power BI app source connector reads directly, and the Business Central data lake export (or the newer Microsoft Fabric link) streams transactional data into a lakehouse for cross-system reporting.
Outlook. The Outlook add-in lets a user open a customer or vendor in Business Central from any email, see open documents, and even create quotes or invoices without leaving Outlook.
Teams. A Business Central card in Teams allows sharing records into a chat, where colleagues can view and act on them inline.
Excel. Almost every list page has an Edit in Excel action that opens a live, two-way Excel workbook — edit, save, and the changes post back to BC. This is the single feature most loved by finance teams.
Copilot. Built-in copilots assist with bank reconciliation, sales line suggestions, product description text, chart explanations, and natural-language report queries. Customers can also build their own Copilot Studio agents that read and write to BC via the same connector stack.
SharePoint/OneDrive. Document attachments on Business Central records are stored in OneDrive/SharePoint, not in the BC database — which keeps the database lean and storage costs predictable.
Related guides
- Application areas in Business CentralHow Application Areas in Business Central control which features users see — Basic, Essential, Premium, and how customisations can extend the application area system.
- Batch posting in Business CentralHow Business Central handles batch posting of journals, orders, and documents — performance, background processing, and the trade-offs against single posting.
- Business Central environments and sandboxesHow environments work in Business Central SaaS — production vs sandbox, capacity, copies, and lifecycle management.
- Business Central feature managementHow Business Central's Feature Management page lets administrators preview, opt-in to, or delay new features within a release wave.
- Business Central licensing and pricingHow Business Central is licensed — Essentials vs Premium, Team Members, External Accountants, and what really drives total cost.