Note: This blog post was first published in December 2021. It has since been updated to reflect the latest changes as of December 2024.
To ensure that end users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central like your staff continue to receive useful insights through the ERP software, Jet Global releases updates for Jet Reports on a regular basis.
These updates bring new features and improvements to Jet Reports, ensuring that the extension remains the business reporting extension of choice for Business Central users.
Here's Why You Should Use Jet Reports With Your Instance Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Here, you’ll find all the details about the improvements and enhancements that the latest updates have brought to Jet Reports.
Overview of Jet Reports Features & Functionalities; Source: insightsoftware
Jet Reports is a reporting and business intelligence (BI) solution that’s designed to seamlessly integrate with both Business Central and Microsoft Excel.
Developed by Jet Global (which was acquired by insightsoftware in 2019), Jet Reports works by pulling your business data from Business Central, and generating reports in Excel spreadsheets that are easy to understand.
Now, let’s take a look at the highlights of the past several updates to Jet Reports.
The version 24.4 update introduces a new AI service to simplify the report creation process and includes features that maintain ongoing performance and connectivity with Business Central Cloud.
To enhance the efficiency and user-friendliness of reporting, Jet Reports has introduced AI Report Assist. This cutting-edge tool allows users to input their report parameters into the Jet Reports AI chat box, and AI Report Assist swiftly creates their customised report. By automating report generation, AI Report Assist saves time, reduces effort, and eases the learning curve linked with conventional reporting techniques.
*Please note that AI Report Assist is currently in "preview" mode and will be available for
use over the next three months. Following this period, it will transition to a paid service
requiring purchase.*
Jet Reports now offers a Platform installation option for those using the command line installer, simplifying the management of Platform account installations. This feature enables businesses to install and activate Platform accounts for all users more efficiently, offering enhanced flexibility and convenience. Existing customers and partners can benefit from a more streamlined and controlled deployment process.
To guarantee compatibility and optimise performance with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 release, new Jet Reports BC extensions have been introduced. The Business Central 2024 Wave 2 update involves modifications to table loading processes. Jet Reports 24.4 has undergone extensive testing to ensure it remains compatible with these changes, maintaining product performance for customers planning to upgrade to the latest version of Business Central.
To offer more flexibility and options for businesses linking Jet Reports to Business Central Public Cloud data sources, Jet Reports 24.4 introduces Business Central Cloud Service-to-Service authentication. This new feature provides an alternative to the existing user authentication data connection method, facilitating a direct application-to-application link that boosts security and efficiency, enabling integrations to operate without user involvement.
Jet Reports Online is set to launch with general availability in Q1 2025. This eagerly anticipated release represents a major advancement in updating Jet Reports to cater to the changing cloud-based requirements of our customers and partners.
What to Expect with Jet Reports Online:
aligns with your transition to cloud solutions. Stay tuned for more updates.
The Version 24.3 update comes with more technology updates for a seamless license activation experience, coupled with new AI tool to streamline complex financial data analysis.
The latest AI tool - Data Assist, enables users to perform real-time trend analysis and anomaly detection easily, while simplifying the analysis of extensive business data. Users can select specific data subsets and receive immediate, detailed analyses that highlight trends and anomalies. With this release, enhanced productivity is achieved through automated or guided analysis, helping users find answers quickly while still maintaining the human touch.
With the latest update, users can now activate licenses through the insightsoftware Platform within the Jet Reports Excel Add-In's 'Active License' menu - without requiring any activation code.
The Jet Excel Add-In installer now includes a sign-in option for the Platform during installation. This improvement removes the need for a separate activation token for insightsoftware Platform accounts, making the license installation and activation process more seamless for users.
The Version 23.3 update comes with significant performance improvements, and resolves many known issues reported by users like yourself. It also includes a note about upcoming features that are being planned for future releases of Jet Reports in 2024.
Based on performance benchmarks that tested a variety of commonly used report-types with data sizes of up to 1 million rows, Jet Reports has improved its reporting run time performance by more than 80% for most types of reports, in most business cases. This means that you can generate reports much more quickly, and get your insights even sooner than before.
This was made possible with a combination of techniques, such as optimising the query engine, reducing the number of database calls, local data caching, and parallel processing of multiple reports. With these, insightsoftware has not only improved the performance of Jet Reports, but also reduced the load it imposes on your data sources and network.
Version 23.3 also resolves multiple issues that users have reported in Jet Reports over the past year. These include, but are not limited to;
Last but not least, insightsoftware is also committing to continued improvement of the performance of Jet Reports, as well as planning new features and functionalities for upcoming updates to the reporting software in the near future. These include:
The Version 23.1 update comes with performance improvements and UX enhancements, which drives faster report times and provides a smoother installation process than before.
Cache tables optimisation will now be turned on by default for users of Jet Reports. The enablement of this feature means that complex reports will see an average of 70% faster run times.
The installer screen UI has been updated to provide a cleaner and more modern look and feel. With this update, you'll get a more intuitive user experience.
With Version 23.2, insightsoftware has also resolved many of the reporting use case issues that have been reported by users like yourself. This allows for increased coverage of the cache table optimisations, and will provide a better user experience and greater satisfaction for you.
The Version 23.1 update comes with technical enhancements for Microsoft solutions like OneDrive, Office 365, and Azure Active Directory. It also brings performance improvements to key Jet Reports functions.
To unify their applications and enable their customers to solve multiple business problems faster with less risk, insightsoftware is building a cloud-based platform that will allow them to pick and choose the capabilities that they need. These including reporting, controllership, as well as budget and planning.
With insightsoftware's cloud platform, business users will have one place to sign-in, launch their applications, and access learning and support resources. Administrators will also get a single channel through which they can manage users, licences, and data source connectivity.
Version 23.1 of Jet Reports is already certified with the insightsoftware cloud platform, with current capabilities including user management, single sign-on, and licence management.
Users will now be able to sync Jet Reports directly with OneDrive when logging in through Office 365 (Azure Active Directory setup is required). Users will no longer get the message to download any files from OneDrive itself, with this feature.
Jet Reports now supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) and service-to-service (S2S) authentication with Azure Active Directory, giving you more choices for your security needs.
Jet Hub users can now authenticate to Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Business Central On-premise data sources with Office 365 credentials, if MFA is enabled on your Azure Active Directory/Office 365 account. This makes for a smoother login and authentication process.
You'll now experience significant improvement with batch executions. When using NF functions on a flow field using flow filters, you can expect up to a 500% performance improvement with batch exeuctions.
When using the GL function with Analysis View turned on while connected to a Business Central SaaS data source, you'll now experience improved performance. This will match your existing user experience with the GL function with the Analysis View turned off.
From Version 23.1 onwards, insightsoftware will no longer include Jet Budgets or Jet Dashboards with an installation of Jet Reports, as both have reached their end-of-life (EOL).
If you're currently using Jet Budgets, insightsoftware offers Bizview; an integrated, web-based budgeting, planning and forecasting solution.
On the other hand, if you're currently using Jet Dashboard Builder, insightsoftware recommends that you switch to Microsoft Power BI as the front-end visualisation and dashboarding tool for Jet Reports from now on. They will also provide Power BI templates to replace the Dashboard Builder templates in the near future.
The Version 22.4 update brings improved usability for Jet Reports, as well as updates to its user interface (UI).
Jet Reports users like yourself can now use a separate Excel ribbonb to upload master records, journals, and transactional data from Jet Reports to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&SCM), more easily and efficiently.
The Version 22.3 update brings upgraded security, improved usability, and updated alignment with Microsoft to Jet Reports.
The default connection for new Jet Reports users has been updated from SOAP to ODATA. This move is to prepare for Microsoft's own depreciation of SOAP, and is intended to keep Jet Reports full aligned with Microsoft's technology stack.
Jet Reports now allows authentication to Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Business Central on-premise data sources with Office 365 credentials, as long as multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled on a user's Office 365 account.
Jet Reports now shows the table relationship detail within the Jet Reports browser. This helps users obtain a clearer understanding of the relationships between various tables that are included in their reports.
To provide a greater user experience and greater customer satisfaction, Jet Reports is focusing on release quality and addressing various customer-reported issues in Version 22.3.
These include:
The Version 22.2 update brings improved security, better usability, and other essential enhancements to Jet Reports.
Jet Reports is now fully compatible with Microsoft Office 2021, to enable users to benefit from the latest enhancements for Microsoft Excel.
The Jet Scheduler has been updated with more secure keylogging logic, ensuring that all Jet components now offer a minimal data security risk.
Source: Jet Reports
Jet Reports now supports exports export of "BinaryText" and "Picture" blob fields, providing users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Public Cloud with additional options for exporting data.
They'll also get additional options for filtering data sources, as Jet Reports will now also filter on Extensible ENUMS.
To provide a better user experience and greater customer satisfaction, Jet Reports is focusing on release quality and has addressed many customer reported issues in Version 22.2.
These issues are as follows:
The Version 22.1 update to Jet Reports includes enhancements to authentication services, as well as improved performance of reports.
Jet Reports introduces Azure AD Authentication for Jet Data Warehouse Data Sources that are hosted in Azure SQL.
This is intended to streamline the login experience, and subsequently improve the ease of use when it comes to data connectivity and authentication.
Jet Global is committed to improving the real-world performance of Jet Reports for customers of Business Central with each release.
For Version 22.1, Business Central users should experience gains in performance around formula calculations, data caching, and batch query execution when they’re using an OData connection.
The Version 21.4 update to Jet Reports includes enhancements to batch report processes, and improves report performance.
Jet Reports introduces a new report scheduling wizard to make scheduling and distributing batch reports faster and easier for your end users, replacing the Excel template that was previously used to create a batch schedule.
The wizard guides end users through a series of simple questions, and uses their answers to automatically generate a batch schedule and report template for them.
If a task fails in Jet Reports, it will now send an email alert to a specified user. This helps your business identify and correct potential errors more quickly during the batch report scheduling and distribution process.
Version 21.4 delivers various optimisations in caching, API management, and paging. These are intended to improve the real-world performance of Jet Reports.
The Version 21.3 update to Jet Reports brings enhanced usability, as well as a deeper focus on release quality.
For end users that lack access to the Jet Admin Console, Version 21.3 improves the support experience by enabling them to turn data logging on or off from either the Jet Hub Interface, or the Jet Services Administration Shell.
This enhancements makes it easier overall to turn data logging on or off, which is often required when support is actively diagnosing an issue.
When end users of Jet Reports fail to specify a sort order, it now consistently sorts results returned by the NL First and Evaluate functions.
With Version 21.3, Jet Global places a strong focus on release quality, and addressed various issues reported by customers. This is intended to provide a better user experience, and improve customer satisfaction with Jet Reports.
The 20.8 update introduces a new connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Cloud, as well as certification with the latest version of Business Central
A new connector based on the OData API is available for Business Central. This connector is significantly faster than the existing SOAP connection.
It can be installed within minutes, and requires the installation of an extension to Business Central.
Jet Reports has been validated against the 2020 Wave 2 update for Business Central, as of this update.
Want To Know What's New With The Latest Product Update For Business Central? Find Out Here.
As an insightsoftware Gold Partner, we at AFON Pte Ltd can help you set up and integrate Jet Reports with your instance of Business Central, and maximise your investment in the ERP software solution from Microsoft accordingly.
Just give us a call at +65 6323 0901 or drop us a note here, and we’ll get in touch to help you with anything related to Business Central or Jet Reports.
But if you were to acquire and integrate Jet Reports with your instance of Business Central, how can you use the reporting and BI solution to its full potential? Click on the image below to read about the top 10 best practices when it comes to business reporting with Microsoft Dynamics.