Every finance team running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has a calendar, and the calendar has a rhythm: close week every month, reporting in the middle, budget season in the fall, board meetings on a fixed cycle. Look closely at each of those moments and you find the same ingredient. Business Central data has to get into Excel, get worked on, and often get back into Business Central again, and most teams still move it by hand.
The fix is a live connection between the two, working in both directions. Velixo adds ERP-connected functions to the Excel you already have, reading from and writing to Business Central through its API instead of through exports and rekeying. Here is what those changes are at each point on the calendar.
Close week: stop rebuilding, start refreshing
The standard close routine starts with an export. Account schedules or analysis views go out as files, get pasted into working papers, and break the formulas waiting there. Then a late adjustment posts and the whole exercise repeats.
With live spreadsheet functions querying Business Central directly, the working papers refresh in place. Open the file, refresh, and the numbers match the general ledger at that moment, including whatever posted an hour ago. When something looks off, drilldown from the cell shows the GL entries behind it and links to the source record in Business Central, so investigating a variance no longer means a filtering expedition in another window.
Accrual and adjustment journals move the other way. Instead of typing lines into the journal page one at a time, you prepare them in Excel, where they usually originate anyway, and push the batch into Business Central in one action. Velixo's Universal Writeback for Business Central, released in version 2026.2, applies the ERP's validation and keeps the audit trail intact on the way in.
Mid-month: reports that send themselves
Between closes, the recurring ask is distribution. Department heads want their spend versus budget. Regional managers want their numbers. Someone in finance packages the same workbooks into the same emails every cycle.
Automated distribution handles this from a schedule. Configure the recipients once, and each report arrives in the right inbox at the appointed hour, generated from live data rather than from whatever was current when someone last remembered to export. The task stops occupying a person.
Budget season: build in Excel, load in bulk
Budgeting is where the manual entry burden peaks. Templates go out to department owners, come back as spreadsheets, get consolidated, and then someone faces the job of getting hundreds or thousands of budget lines into Business Central.
When the spreadsheet can write to the ERP, that last step shrinks from days to minutes. The consolidated budget pushes into Business Central G/L budgets in bulk, revisions push the same way, and the version the ERP holds is always the version finance approved. The modeling stays in Excel, where budget owners are comfortable. Only the loading is automated.
Board day: one workbook, every company
For multi-company organizations, board reporting means consolidation, and consolidation done manually means pulling from each company, normalizing, translating currency, and building eliminations by hand in a workbook that grows more fragile every quarter.
A live connection reads across Business Central companies into a single workbook. Currency translation and eliminations sit in formulas a reviewer can audit rather than inside a separate consolidation tool. Preparing the board pack shrinks to a refresh and a review.
What teams get back
The savings are measured in hours per month, and they compound. Among Velixo customers across its supported ERPs,, cut his board management report preparation from six hours to one hour. A construction firm recovered 24 to 32 hours a month across six project managers on one recurring cost report. An agribusiness finance team saves 50 to 100 hours a month, largely by pushing journals and price updates from Excel into the ERP in bulk.
Because the tool lives inside Excel and authenticates with existing Business Central credentials and permissions, IT involvement is minimal and there is no new platform for the finance team to learn. If they can write a formula, they can build the report.
Common questions from Business Central teams
Does this replace account schedules or Business Central's built-in reporting? No. Built-in reporting still serves its purpose. This approach covers the work that happens in Excel: formatted management reports, working papers, budgets, and consolidations that native reporting cannot produce in the layout the business expects.
Is the data secure once it is in a spreadsheet? The connection runs under each user's own Business Central permissions, so users see only what their ERP role allows. Unlike a static export, the workbook remains a governed view of live data rather than an orphaned copy.
Can budget data really be trusted going back into the ERP? Writeback passes through Business Central's own validation, and every push is confirmed by the user before it happens. Nothing writes automatically. The audit trail records the entries the same way manual input would, minus the typos.
How long does setup take? Most teams are producing live reports within days. One Velixo customer went live in two weeks by connecting twenty years of existing Excel reports rather than rebuilding them.
For the full list of ways automation removes repetitive spreadsheet work, across every ERP Velixo supports, read . Or book a demo and bring your slowest report. That is usually the fastest way to see the difference.