What You Can Ask For

This page shows what an AI report can contain and how to ask for it. Every example is a sentence you can put in an instruction's prompt or type in the designer's chat. The agent works out the tables, queries and layout itself, and you can steer it as precisely as you like.

Data Sources

Ledger and document data

Ask in business terms. The agent finds the tables, reads their fields and queries them.

You write	The agent uses
"Revenue and gross margin by item category."	Value entries (sales amount and cost), grouped by the item's category
"Top 10 customers by revenue, with change against the comparison period."	Customer ledger or value entries for both periods, ranked
"Open receivables by age bucket: current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90 days past due."	Open customer ledger entries with remaining amounts and due dates
"Open sales orders not shipped yet, by expected shipment week."	Sales headers and lines
"Purchases by vendor for the quarter, top 15."	Vendor ledger or purchase invoice data
"Expenses by department (global dimension 1), against budget 2026."	G/L entries by dimension, and G/L budget entries

The agent knows the common Business Central tables and their conventions. For example, credits are negative in G/L entries, so it presents income as positive and says so in a footnote. If a figure has a specific meaning in your company, define it: "Revenue = accounts 40000..49999."

Your financial reports

If the organisation has already defined a figure in a financial report (account schedule), name the report. The agent runs it for the report period, and again for the comparison period, instead of rebuilding the figures from G/L entries:

"Use the financial report P&L-MGMT for revenue, gross profit and operating result." "Show the balance sheet from the financial report BS-SHORT at the end of the period and at the end of the comparison period." "Run P&L-MGMT filtered on department SALES and on department ADMIN and show them side by side."

Financial reports carry your own account grouping, totals and sign conventions, so this is the most reliable source for statements. Dimension and budget filters work too: "…with budget column from budget 2026".

Your saved spreadsheets

A spreadsheet the team already uses can feed a report. The agent opens it read-only, sets its slicers and reads the computed cells:

"Use the spreadsheet SALES-DASH. Set its period slicer to the report period and read the KPI page; then set it to the comparison period and read it again."

Give the sheet page regions so the agent reads the presentable area. The sheet is never changed or saved, and the agent can open only sheets the user running the report may open.

Other companies

"Compare revenue for CRONUS US and CRONUS Canada side by side." "Consolidated cash position across all three companies: Main, Nordic, US."

The agent can query other companies of the same environment and run financial reports in them, if the user running the report has access to those companies. Name the companies exactly as they are called in Business Central.

No period: the current state

An instruction without period formulas reports on now: balances, open items, stock, master data.

"Inventory value by location and the 20 items with the highest stock value. Items below their reorder point in a separate table."

Graphics

All graphics are drawn by the app inside Business Central. The agent supplies the numbers, so charts are exact and consistent with the house style. Ask for them by type, or describe what you want to see.

Charts

Column, bar, line, area, pie, donut and waterfall.

You write	You get
"A column chart of monthly revenue for the trailing 12 months, this year against last year."	Grouped columns, two series, one per year
"Revenue by salesperson as a horizontal bar chart, largest first."	A bar chart
"Cost structure as a donut chart."	A donut chart with legend
"A line chart of the receivables balance at each month end this year."	A line chart
"Stacked columns of overdue amounts per month by age bucket."	Stacked columns
"A waterfall from last year's operating result to this year's: revenue change, margin change, each cost line, ending in this year's result."	A waterfall with running total
"Variance against budget per department as a bar chart, coloured by sign."	A diverging palette: positive and negative bars in contrasting colours

Colours derive from the accent colour (the house style or #0F6CBD). You can name a palette: "colour-blind safe colours", "one colour in shades", "complementary colours". The agent is told to show a chart's numbers in a table as well, for readers who cannot see the chart. Ask for "chart only" if you do not want that.

KPI tiles

A row of tiles for the headline numbers: value, change, arrow and colour.

"KPI tiles for revenue, gross margin %, operating result and days sales outstanding, each with the change against the comparison period. A rising DSO is bad." "A target tile: revenue against the annual target of 12,000,000, as a donut." "A trend tile for cash with a sparkline of the last 12 month-end balances." "A status tile for overdue receivables: critical above 15% of total receivables."

Tile types:

Stat: value and change.
Trend: adds a sparkline.
Target: progress bar or donut towards a target.
Status: OK, warning or critical badge.

Say which direction is good when it is not "up". For costs, days outstanding and headcount, a rise is usually unfavourable.

Sankey (flow) diagrams

Ribbons between boxes, with thickness showing the amount. Ideal when the reader should see where the money goes:

"The income statement as a sankey: revenue lines into total revenue, then into cost of goods sold and gross profit, gross profit into the operating expense lines and operating income, operating income into tax and net income. Costs red, results green." "Cash sources to cash uses for the quarter as a flow diagram." "Quantities from vendor to warehouse location to customer for item 1000."

Diagrams

Structure and sequence, without amounts:

You write	You get
"Our group structure as an org chart: Holding owns US (100%) and Canada (80%)."	A flowchart
"The month-end close as a gantt chart: steps, owners and working days 1–5."	A gantt chart
"The approval flow for purchase invoices above 10,000."	A flowchart with decisions
"The life cycle of a sales order: open, released, shipped, invoiced."	A state diagram
"Milestones of the ERP project this year as a timeline."	A timeline

Diagrams can also be flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class and entity-relationship diagrams, mind maps and user journeys. Pie charts always come from the chart engine. Diagrams are for structure; figures belong in charts and tables.

Tables and Text

"A table of the 10 largest customers: name, revenue this period, revenue comparison period, change in amount and %, sorted by revenue." "Highlight negative changes in red." "Show amounts in thousands with one decimal." "An executive summary of four sentences at the top, and three recommendations at the end." "Explain the two largest movements in plain language for non-accountants."

The agent writes in the language of the instruction. If nothing else is specified, the report has:

a header with title, company, period, comparison period and generation date,
an executive summary,
a row of KPI tiles,
sections with tables and charts,
a closing Notes and data sources section listing the tables and financial reports used, sign conventions and caveats.

Layout and Style

Rules for every report belong in the house style (AI Report Setup). Rules for one report belong in its prompt:

"Two charts side by side under the KPI tiles." "Print on A4 landscape; each section starts on a new page." "Navy header, no other colour than the accent." "Keep it to one printed page."

The agent's built-in defaults:

a clean, print-friendly page about 1100 px wide,
system fonts,
one accent colour,
green and red only for favourable and unfavourable changes,
right-aligned numbers with thousands separators,
light grid lines and zebra rows.

What the Agent Will Not Do

Change data. Every tool is read-only. Spreadsheets are opened read-only and never saved.
Invent numbers. Every figure comes from a query, financial report or spreadsheet. Empty data is reported as empty, and assumptions are stated in the report.
Use outside resources. No web lookups, external scripts, stylesheets, fonts or images. Reports are self-contained files.
Read the app's own tables (spreadsheets, AI reports, prompts, permission lists) through its queries.

Reading the Generation Log: Tool Names

The generation log lists the agent's tool calls by name:

Tool	What the agent did
`aireport_searchtable`	Searched for a table by name or number
`aireport_getfields`	Read a table's fields, options and keys
`aireport_sqlquery`	Ran a SELECT query (the SQL text shows exactly which data was used)
`aireport_finreport`	Ran a financial report, or listed them
`aireport_listsheets`, `aireport_opensheet`, `aireport_readsheet`	Listed, opened and read saved spreadsheets, with the slicer values it set
`aireport_chart`, `aireport_kpi`, `aireport_sankey`, `aireport_mermaid`	Rendered a chart, KPI tile, sankey or diagram (the parameters show the numbers it passed)
`aireport_write`, `aireport_read`, `aireport_edit`	Wrote the page, read it back, corrected it
`aireport_getinstruction`, `aireport_updateinstruction`, `aireport_listreports`, `aireport_loadreport`, `aireport_savereport`	Designer only: read and rewrote the instruction, listed, loaded and saved reports

The SQL in aireport_sqlquery uses the app's own SQL engine, with Business Central table and field names in square brackets. You can paste a statement into a SQL region of a spreadsheet to see the same rows.