How to Refresh Power BI Data in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations provides out-of-the-box embedded Power BI reports for your analytics with F&O data. However, a problem sometimes crops up with missing data that won’t reappear when you refresh normally.

As a senior BI analyst who often works with Encore’s Finance & Operations team, I handle complex Power BI projects for our Dynamics 365 clients. However, this refresh problem is one of the simpler issues I’ve seen, and you can probably tackle it on your own by following the instructions below.

Table of Contents

• What the Power BI Refresh Problem Looks Like
• How It Works
• How to Refresh Your F&O Data in Power BI
• Further Troubleshooting with Power BI in F&O

Note: Even though most customers, commentators, and consultants still call it Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations or D365FO, Microsoft now technically licenses it as Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.

What the Power BI Refresh Problem Looks Like

You’ll notice this problem if:

• You’re using the out-of-the-box embedded Power BI reports in Finance & Operations.
• You found that Power BI is not displaying all the data.
• You tried to refresh it by clicking the “Refresh” button and clearing all the filters, but that didn’t work.

If that’s the problem you’re facing, we have a solution for you.

How It Works

The out-of-the-box, embedded Power BI reports do not connect to your F&O directly. Instead, these reports connect with the Entity Store.

The reports use a DirectQuery method and pull data from entities instead.

For example, the data source of the “Sales and profitability performance” report is a Sales Cube Entity.

In other words, you need to refresh the entity to see all data from Power BI reports.

How to Refresh Your F&O Data in Power BI

Follow the steps below to refresh your data:

1. Go to System administration > Setup > Entity Store.
2. Select entity. You can either refresh it on demand or set automatic refresh.
3. Refresh it now by clicking the Refresh button.

You should see refreshed data from the reports soon (time depends on volume of data).

You can also enable Automatic refresh, choose how often it will recur, and save the settings.

Further Troubleshooting with Power BI in F&O

If the steps above did not refresh your data, most likely the job is pending or withholding. To fix that problem, follow these steps:

1. Go to System administration > Withheld batch jobs.
2. Search “full reset”.
3. Delete any pending/withholding and batch jobs associated with the entity store.

After deletion, you will now see “Full reset” in either the Running or Waiting batch jobs monitor section.

And with that, your out-of-the-box embedded Power BI report in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations should now refresh properly, and you can get on to working with the report you needed.

At Encore, we enjoy solving tough Dynamics 365-related problems for our clients, and we love to educate all Dynamics 365 users on how to work faster and better in their systems. If you’re looking for a Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations Partner to give you support, training, integrations, or implementations across the full Microsoft stack, please contact us. We’d love to help.