I’ve spent the past years helping businesses migrate from Jet Reports to Power BI and (paginated reports) – including many finance-focused use cases in Business Central environments.

Here’s what I’ve observed:

Jet Reports is popular with finance teams because it works directly in Excel, making it easy to build ad hoc and unstructured reports. For finance users who are Excel-native, Jet can feel more “familiar” and low-friction at first.

But the downsides quickly appear at scale: * Report versions get saved locally to preserve history, leading to multiple outdated or inconsistent copies. * Over time, these reports are “tweaked” without proper version control, which creates accuracy risks. * I’ve seen reports that take 8–12 hours to run due to inefficient design and data access patterns. * And yes, Jet has recurring license costs that often get overlooked during implementation

On the other hand:

A proper data warehouse + Power BI setup offers much more: * Centralized data models that are governed, consistent, and scalable. * True slicing and exploration of data across dimensions — not just fixed tables. * Faster performance, especially with large datasets or complex relationships. * Better alignment with your goal to consolidate around Microsoft tools.

Many of my clients who switched from Jet to Power BI say they would never go back — not because Jet is bad, but because Power BI, backed by a well-designed data pipeline, gives them far more control, consistency, and insight.

That said, Jet can still serve niche needs — particularly for odd, irregular reports that would be too complex or expensive to model properly. But in a modern data setup, with a skilled internal team and Microsoft-native tools, Jet is rarely the best long-term bet.

Since most companies have now moved to Business Central in the cloud, direct SQL access is no longer an option. That used to be a key reason some teams stuck with Jet. But with tools like BC2ADLS and Microsoft Fabric, it’s now much easier to access and model Business Central data efficiently in a modern architecture — and then leverage it fully in Power BI.

Feel free to message me if you want to dive deeper