{"id":1004,"date":"2026-11-05T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/?p=1004"},"modified":"2026-11-05T08:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T13:30:00","slug":"still-exporting-bc-to-excel-every-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/still-exporting-bc-to-excel-every-monday\/","title":{"rendered":"BC Teardown #4: Still exporting BC to Excel every Monday?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2>The pain<\/h2>\n<p>Someone exports invoices, pastes them into last week&#8217;s file, fixes the pivot and emails it out. The numbers are stale the moment they are sent.<\/p>\n<h2>Why it happens<\/h2>\n<p>There is no clean, live feed of the data you report on, so people rebuild it by hand.<\/p>\n<h2>Before: The Monday ritual<\/h2>\n<pre style=\"background:#0c182c;color:#e6ecf5;padding:20px 24px;border-radius:10px;overflow-x:auto;font-size:15px;line-height:1.55;\"><code>\/\/ 1. Open Posted Sales Invoices\n\/\/ 2. Open in Excel, export\n\/\/ 3. Paste into last week's file\n\/\/ 4. Fix the pivot table\n\/\/ 5. Email it to the team\n\n\/\/ Repeat every Monday<\/code><\/pre>\n<h2>After: A read only API page for Power BI<\/h2>\n<pre style=\"background:#0c182c;color:#e6ecf5;padding:20px 24px;border-radius:10px;overflow-x:auto;font-size:15px;line-height:1.55;\"><code>page 50120 \"DF Invoice Lines API\"\n{\n  PageType = API;\n  APIPublisher = 'dataflow';\n  APIGroup = 'reporting';\n  APIVersion = 'v1.0';\n  EntityName = 'invoiceLine';\n  EntitySetName = 'invoiceLines';\n  SourceTable = \"Sales Invoice Line\";\n  ODataKeyFields = SystemId;\n  Editable = false;\n  layout { area(Content) { repeater(Lines) {\n    field(id; Rec.SystemId) { }\n    field(documentNo; Rec.\"Document No.\") { }\n    field(itemNo; Rec.\"No.\") { }\n    field(amount; Rec.Amount) { }\n  } } }\n}<\/code><\/pre>\n<h2>The result<\/h2>\n<p>Power BI connects to the API and refreshes on a schedule. The Monday report builds itself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tip:<\/strong> Add only the fields you report on. Smaller APIs refresh faster.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/BC-Teardown-4-carousel.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Download this teardown as a PDF<\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Got a Business Central problem like this?<\/strong> Free 30 minute review of your setup. Senior Microsoft certified developers, and you talk to the person writing the code. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dataflowsoln.com\/#contact\">Contact Dataflow Solutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone exports invoices, pastes them into last week&#8217;s file, fixes the pivot and emails it out. The numbers are stale the moment they are sent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,9,18],"class_list":["post-1004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bc-teardowns","tag-api-pages","tag-business-central","tag-power-bi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1026,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions\/1026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dataflowsoln.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}