Updated January 2026
From Panic to Planning: Inventory Forecasting That Actually Works
The reality for most distribution and manufacturing companies is that inventory management feels like an endless cycle of emergencies. You’re either scrambling because you ran out of something critical, or you’re tying up cash in overstock trying to avoid the next stockout. Neither situation is sustainable, and both are expensive.
Business Central’s new Power BI inventory forecasting report uses statistical modeling to predict your future inventory needs based on actual historical patterns. This is machine learning analyzing your transaction history to identify patterns, account for seasonality, and project likely demand with confidence intervals.
Here’s where it gets practical. You can filter by specific locations, individual items, or ledger entry types. Click a warehouse location and see forecasted needs for that specific facility. Select a product and understand whether demand is trending up, down, or stable. This dimensional forecasting means you can answer real questions like “Will our Chicago warehouse need more of Product X next month?” or “Should we increase orders before peak season hits?”
The visualization shows your actual historical inventory levels, forecasted future levels, and upper and lower bounds representing the confidence interval. This range perspective helps you understand uncertainty and plan accordingly. You can adjust parameters including forecast length, seasonality cycles, and confidence interval width—it’s ongoing refinement as you learn which settings match your real-world outcomes.
Project Profitability: Know What You Are Making Before It Is Too Late
If you deliver projects—whether manufacturing custom products, providing professional services, or implementing solutions—you’ve probably experienced the painful surprise of discovering a project wasn’t as profitable as you thought after it’s complete and the customer is long gone.
Business Central’s enhanced Power BI app for projects includes a critical metric: billable-to-invoice percentage. This immediately shows how much of your completed billable work has actually been invoiced. Why does this matter? Because unbilled work represents value you’ve delivered but haven’t yet converted to revenue, directly impacting both cash flow and how profitable your projects actually look.
The report now includes all sales types: resources (consultant time, labor), items (materials, products), and general ledger accounts (services). You see complete project revenue and profitability regardless of what you’re selling, helping you discover whether your resource revenue is more profitable than product sales, or whether certain service types consistently deliver better margins.
The Project Invoice Sales by Customer report flips the perspective to show profitability by customer. This analysis answers strategic questions like which customers are your most profitable project clients and whether you should pursue more work with specific customers based on actual profitability history.
Open Source Customization Changes Everything
The Projects Power BI app is now open source. You can download the complete source code for both report visuals and the semantic model as a PBX file, which fundamentally changes customization economics.
Previously, you either accepted Microsoft’s standard app or built custom analytics from scratch (expensive and time-consuming). Now you download Microsoft’s professionally built app, customize only the elements needing adjustment, and deploy your enhanced version. This accelerates custom analytics development dramatically while giving you enterprise-grade functionality as your starting point.
Getting Started and Strategic Implementation
For inventory forecasting, start with your high-value, stable items—products with consistent demand patterns and significant business impact. Track how predictions compare to actual demand for the first few cycles to build confidence. The key is embedding forecasting into your actual purchasing decisions, not treating it as separate analysis.
For project profitability, define what profitability means for your business before diving into reports. Establish a regular review cadence and use the billable-to-invoice percentage to drive billing discipline. Analyze profitability both by what you sell (resources versus products versus services) and by who you sell to (customer profitability).
Ready to Stop Flying Blind?
Every distribution and manufacturing business faces the same challenge: making decisions about the future based on information about the past. The question is whether that information gives you enough intelligence to predict what’s coming, or whether you’re just reacting to problems after they’ve already cost you money and customers.
Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2’s Power BI enhancements transform inventory management and project delivery from reactive scrambling to proactive planning. When you forecast inventory needs before stockouts occur and track project profitability with precision while you still have time to course-correct, you make fundamentally better decisions about ordering, resource allocation, customer relationships, and pricing.
At CAL Business Solutions, we’ve been helping mid-market distribution and manufacturing companies optimize their Business Central implementations for over 40 years. We understand both the technical features and the business processes that drive inventory management and project delivery.
Ready to see how these Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2 features can transform your operations? Contact us today to learn more about leveraging enhanced Power BI capabilities for smarter inventory management and project profitability tracking.
By CAL Business Solutions, Connecticut Acumatica & Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC/GP Partner, www.calszone.com
