News & Insights | Dynamics 365 Business Applications

Unlocking business intelligence with reporting & dashboards in Dynamics 365

Written by TD SYNNEX | 12 September 2025 09:38:12 Z

Business intelligence is the secret weapon of any growing business. It allows senior leaders to make strategic decisions, track performance, and identify new opportunities. In this article, we’ll review the reporting and dashboard capabilities of Dynamics 365 CRM and how they’re helping businesses to drive improvements and grow.

Why reporting and dashboards matter for business intelligence

For decision makers and senior leaders, the value of reporting goes way beyond the numbers on the screen. It’s the insights gained from those numbers and how they enable strategic decision-making that matters.

With these insights, leadership can:

  • Drive improvement: By focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs), they can identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or underutilised resources.
  • Identify trends and opportunities: Leaders can use data on customer behaviour and market trends to position offerings more effectively, refine pricing, and identify new opportunities.
  • Reduce costs and streamline operations: Insights into how resources are used or how service costs play out across a customer lifecycle allow decision-makers to spot processes that can be made more efficient (or affordable).
  • Forecast more effectively: Accurate, historic data gives senior leaders a better understanding of how an organisation will perform in the future. This enables them to manage risk and make a business more resilient to change.

How analytics, reporting, and dashboard features in Dynamics 365 help

To benefit from reliable business intelligence, organisations first need reporting capabilities that make relevant data visible, dashboards to visualise and share it, and a platform to manage it all from.

This is where Dynamics 365 CRM comes in. It has a powerful suite of reporting and analytics tools to gather data and present it in real time, as well as dashboard creation capabilities that visualise data and make it more digestible.

The analytics features available in Dynamics CRM

Dynamics 365 CRM has advanced analytics capabilities that give senior leaders a holistic view of the business. They can use this information to manage processes, performance, and operations more proactively and to drive positive improvements that make a real difference over time.

Analytics available in Dynamics 365 CRM include:

  • Historical analytics: Which let businesses analyse trends over time in areas like sales performance, customer success, or ROI from campaigns
  • Real-time data: This gives senior leaders oversight on current performance against key metrics like customer satisfaction, service quality, and productivity
  • Predictive insights: AI-powered forecasting allows decision makers to predict against revenue metrics, lead conversion rates, purchasing costs, and market trends

A real strength of Dynamics 365 is that this data can come from more than just the CRM. By integrating the CRM with other Microsoft solutions and third-party systems, senior leaders can view data across multiple functions, like marketing, sales, service, and finance.

This gives senior leaders end-to-end visibility on business performance, which they can use to make impactful strategic decisions. And as the integrations are low-code, accessing holistic data like this is almost effortless.

Reporting and dashboards in Dynamics 365 CRM

For data to be used to drive decision-making, it has to be digestible. The built-in dashboard and reporting features in Dynamics 365 make visualising data simple.

Organisations can create custom dashboards for roles or business functions to visualise KPIs and important business metrics. The dashboards themselves can be embedded in application workspaces, so employees can see data and KPI performance from within their preferred app.

Reports and dashboards in Dynamics 365 CRM can be easily customised to reflect specific targets and priorities, or to share the most relevant information with teams and employees.

Then there’s the integrations to consider!

Dynamics 365 integrations that unlock new reporting and dashboard capabilities

An integration with Power BI extends dashboard creation capabilities even further. Allowing businesses to create interactive reports that can be filtered by product, region, role, and more. Or cross-functional reports that incorporate data from multiple departments or processes to provide insights into business-wide performance.

Integrating Dynamics 365 CRM with Power Automate makes reporting more efficient, keeps stakeholders informed, and helps senior leaders align employees with strategic objectives.

Businesses can automate routine reporting tasks and create triggers that automatically share reports and dashboards with stakeholders or relevant employees.

Want to unlock more business intelligence with Dynamics 365 CRM?

For senior leaders and decision-makers, business intelligence is a goldmine of potential. It allows them to set the direction, ensure employees are aligned with strategic objectives, and drive continual improvement. It's also vital for employees, too. Having access to the right information at the right time helps teams understand their priorities and work more efficiently, while adding that all-important context to the "why" of their work.

This is why Dynamics 365 CRM includes enterprise-grade reporting capabilities and dashboard features, which provide actionable business intelligence that helps organisations evolve and improve.

Want to see how businesses like yours are using reporting and dashboards in Dynamics 365 CRM to drive growth? Download our Dynamics of Success report below: