Live Business Central data, right inside Excel.

What is IBB Reports

IBB Reports is an Excel add-in by IBB Innovations, LLC. It connects Excel to your Business Central environment and brings the numbers in live through a family of worksheet functions, a guided task pane, and ready-made reports.

• Ask IBB: type what you want in plain English (“income statement for last quarter”) and IBB builds the report.
• Spreadsheet functions: type =IBB.NL(...), =IBB.GL(...), =IBB.FS(...) and more to pull lists, totals, account balances and full statements.
• Ready-made reports: generate a fully formatted Accounts Receivable with Details aging report, income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, budget-vs-actual and more in a couple of clicks.
• Custom reports & a Report Designer: run saved client templates, or design your own report once and reuse it.
• Always current: refresh and every figure re-reads live from Business Central. Nothing is stored outside your tenant.

Install the add-in

IBB Reports runs in Excel on the desktop and on the web. Your Microsoft 365 administrator deploys it to your organization; once deployed, it appears automatically for everyone, there is nothing to download.

For everyone

Open Excel (desktop or the web). You'll see an IBB Reports tab on the ribbon. Click IBB Reports on that tab to open the task pane, then start a free trial or activate.

For the Microsoft 365 administrator (org-wide deploy)

1. Open the Microsoft 365 admin center → Settings → Integrated apps (or Add-ins).
2. Choose Upload custom apps → I have a URL for the manifest file.
3. Paste the manifest URL IBB Innovations provided (it points to reports.ibbinnovations.com), assign it to Everyone (or the right group), and deploy.
4. Allow a short while for Microsoft to push it to users' Excel.

Free trial & activation

The first time you open the task pane you'll see the start screen. There are two ways in.

Start a free trial

Click Start free trial and sign in with your Microsoft work account. You get a 14-day, full-feature trial, no license key and no credit card required.

Activate with a license key

1. Enter your IBB-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX key from your welcome email.
2. Click Activate and confirm your Microsoft work account. Your email must already be added to that key.

Once you're in, you stay signed in on that device.

“<your email> isn't on this license.” A key-based activation needs both the key and your email being a seat on it. Ask your administrator to add your email in the licenses portal, or start a free trial instead.

For administrators: adding people to a key

Each client gets one license key. In the licenses portal you add the email of every person who should use it (a “seat”). Add a seat to grant access, remove it to cut someone off; the key itself never changes. Plans (Starter / Pro / Enterprise) are set on the key. Need a key for a team? Visit ibb-reports.ibbinnovations.com.

The task pane at a glance

Everything lives in one pane that shows one page per function. The header has three things: the IBB Reports logo (click it to return to the Ask IBB home), your active Company, and the Menu button that opens every page.

Open the Menu (top-right) and you'll find:

The bottom of the Menu also has Reload and Sign out. The ribbon's own buttons open the pane directly on the matching page.

Ask IBB

The home screen is a single box: type what you want in plain English and IBB works out which report to build. It's the fastest way to get a finished report without knowing the functions or hunting through menus.

1. On the Home screen, type a request, for example “income statement for Contoso, last quarter” or “AR aging as of March 31”.
2. IBB reads it and shows back what it understood: the report, the company and the dates.
3. If it needs to know which company, pick one from the dropdown it shows.
4. Click Generate. The finished report lands on a new worksheet.

Run & refresh

The Run / refresh page recalculates your IBB.* formulas with fresh figures from Business Central.

• Scope: refresh the whole workbook, the active sheet, or just your selection.
• Ignore cache: turn on to force a fully fresh pull (results are briefly cached for speed).
• Run / Cancel: start or stop the refresh.

The ribbon's Run button is a menu with three speeds: Run (fresh), Run from Cache (fast) and Run in Background (keeps Excel responsive).

Drill-down

Drill-down shows the underlying Business Central entries that make up a number.

• Double-click an amount on any report IBB generated (statements, AR aging, custom reports) and the pane opens the Drill-down page with the records behind that cell.
• Or select a cell holding an IBB.GL, IBB.NL or IBB.FS value and click Drill active cell (also on the ribbon as Drill Down).

IBB.* functions

You can type the functions directly into any cell, or build them with the Function builder (Menu → Insert, or the ribbon's Insert Function): pick a function, fill the boxes, see a live formula preview, and click Insert into cell.

Every function reads live from your active company (switch it from the header or the Companies page). Filters use Business Central's own syntax, for example >0, 10000..19999, SALES|ADMIN.

=IBB.NL("Rows", "customers", "displayName", "balanceDue", ">0")

=IBB.GL("40000..49999", "2024-01-01", "2024-12-31", "DEPARTMENT=SALES")

=IBB.FS("income", "2024-01-01", "2024-12-31")

=IBB.AR("2024-03-31", 30)

=IBB.NF(A2, "displayName")

=IBB.NP("Companies")

Financial statements

Open Statements from the Menu (or the ribbon's Report Wizard) to build a finished income statement (P&L), balance sheet, trial balance or cash flow. Pick the Statement, set the Start and End dates, then:

• Generate to sheet: a fully formatted, sectioned statement on its own worksheet (assets / liabilities / equity, or revenue / cost of goods sold / expenses) with totals that foot.
• Generate comparative: the same statement with current vs prior period, variance and variance %.
• Insert as formula: drops a live =IBB.FS(...) that spills the statement and refreshes when you change the dates.

For one-click access, the ribbon's Balance Sheet and P&L buttons open Statements with that statement already selected; just set the dates and Generate.

AR aging report

The AR aging page produces a fully formatted Accounts Receivable with Details report on its own worksheet, matching the classic “AR with Details” layout.

• As-of date & Period (days): the cutoff and bucket size (e.g. 30 → Current / 0-30 / 31-60 / 61-90 / 91+).
• Age by: Due date or Posting date.
• Customer filter & Minimum balance: narrow the list.
• Summary only, Include credit balances, Consolidate all companies: toggles.

Click Generate report for the formatted sheet, or Insert IBB.AR to drop the formula into the active cell.

Custom reports

The Custom reports page holds report templates beyond the standard statements. Set the period, then generate any of them to their own worksheet:

• Consolidated: a balance sheet and income statement across all your companies.
• GL by Company: G/L account balances with one column per company.
• P&L by Partner: an income statement broken out by the Partner dimension, for a single month or year-to-date.
• Your saved reports: anything you built in the Report Designer, ready to run, edit or delete.

Report Designer

The Report Designer (Menu → Custom reports → Design a report, or the ribbon's Report Designer) lets you build a report once and save it to your license key for reuse, no formulas required.

1. Start from a P&L or Balance Sheet template, or a blank form.
2. Add columns: Period, Year-to-date, Balance, Budget, Prior period, % of row, or a By-dimension breakdown.
3. Add rows: section headers, account lines (with an account number or range like 4000..4999), subtotals, a grand total, and spacers.
4. Choose Consolidated (all companies) or the active company, and whether to hide zero rows.
5. Save it. It now appears on the Custom reports page for anyone on your key.

From the saved list you can Generate a report for any period, Edit it, Save as copy, or Delete it.

Schedule & distribute

The Scheduled reports page lets a report run on its own and be delivered, so no one has to open Excel.

• Give the schedule a name, an account range, a start/end date and an interval in minutes.
• Click Create schedule; it appears in the list below where you can Run it now, Disable/Enable or delete it.
• Output is rendered to an Excel file and delivered to your configured destination; alerts can fire when a value crosses a threshold.

The ribbon's Batch Wizard, Word Export and Upload round out distribution.

Report options

The Report options page (Menu → Setup) lets you define named prompt variables written to defined names (IBB_OPT_<name>) that your formulas can reference.

Add an option, give it a value, and click Apply options to write the named ranges into the workbook. It's an easy way to drive several formulas (dates, account ranges, company) from one place.

Companies

The active Company drives every function and report. Open the Companies page (the company button in the header, Menu → Companies, or the ribbon's Companies) to switch it. Your choice is remembered and used by both the task pane and the in-cell IBB.* functions.

To combine companies, most reports accept a consolidation option (“all companies”), and functions take "*" for all or "A|B" for a subset.

Settings

The Settings page is a set of collapsible sections (all closed by default; open the one you need):

• General: interface language and default run scope.
• Connection: the API base URL, your Business Central Tenant ID, and the Business Central environment to read from. Only environments your license grants appear here.
• Performance: cache lifetime.
• Email & Distribution, Logging, Updates, About & License and Data Sources.

Use Test Connection (on the ribbon) any time to confirm the add-in can reach Business Central; it should return your list of companies. You're signed out from the Menu.

Ribbon reference

The IBB Reports ribbon tab groups the same actions for quick access:

Plans

Your plan is set on your license key. To change it, contact IBB Innovations.

Troubleshooting

The add-in won't load, or shows an old version

Make sure Excel is signed in with the Microsoft work account in the tenant where IBB Reports was deployed (top-right avatar → switch account). A centrally-deployed add-in only appears under its own tenant. If Excel cached an old version, close and reopen the pane, or restart Excel.

“<email> isn't on this license”

For a key-based activation, your email needs to be added to the license key by your administrator. Or start a free trial instead, which needs only your Microsoft sign-in.

A report can't reach Business Central

Run Test Connection from the ribbon. If it doesn't return your companies, the connection is down; check that you're signed in and that your key or trial is active. Re-run after a moment.

A formula shows #BUSY or #N/A

Press Run to refresh, and confirm the active Company in the header is correct. If an in-cell IBB.* function stays on #BUSY, the custom-functions runtime is still starting; give it a minute, or fully close and reopen Excel. For finished reports you can always use the Generate to sheet buttons (Balance Sheet, P&L, AR Aging); they render straight to a worksheet and don't depend on the in-cell runtime.

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