How do I get per-project profit and loss from Business Central?

You get a per-project profit and loss view drawn from your Dynamics 365 Business Central jobs - budget, actual cost, commitments, contract value and gross margin - refreshed nightly and queryable from Claude or ChatGPT. Business Central stays the system of record; Demiton keeps the register.

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What you need

• Tier: Connected - AU$4,167/month or AU$50,000/year, plus a one-off implementation fee
• Systems: Business Central (system key D365_BUSINESS_CENTRAL), with read access to Jobs and project ledger entries
• Helpful, not required: Assignar and KeyPay, so labour and payroll costs can be attributed to the same project

The Business Central connector authenticates with OAuth 2.0 through an Entra ID service principal and reads over OData v4. See Business Central for the connection values and the permission sets to assign.

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How it works

1. FETCH. The connector reads your Business Central project and ledger data through OData. The adapter probes your environment’s OData metadata, so any job entity you expose can be targeted.
2. Record the register. Financial records land on registers, not on system-shaped tables:
   • profit_and_loss - one semantic record per project and financial period, carrying budget_amount, actual_amount, variance_amount, commitments_amount, contract_value_amount, claimed_to_date_amount, gross_margin_amount and gross_margin_pct.
   • budget_vs_actual - organisation-level general-ledger budget against actual spend, grouped by expense_category.
   • job_budget - the ERP job budget, by expense category.
   • cost_element - one record per job cost element from Business Central, including amount, cost_code, cost_type, quantity and vendor.
   • project_list - the project identity register, which holds which jobs exist and who they belong to, and deliberately holds no money.
3. TRANSFORM. Cost categories and job numbers are normalised so records from Business Central mean the same thing as records from any other finance system feeding the same register.
4. Refresh nightly. Per-project P&L is refreshed nightly, so the register is current without anyone exporting a report.
5. PUSH and GOVERN. Write-back to Business Central happens only through a governed workflow with explicit approval. Every write adapter supports simulation mode first, and a Protocol Zero lock prevents any write to a PRODUCTION environment unless the workflow is configured for it.

See the published contracts for profit_and_loss, budget_vs_actual, job_budget, cost_element and project_list.

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What you can ask

• “What is the gross margin on each job this financial year?”
• “Which projects are over budget against their commitments?”
• “Show me the biggest cost elements on the Gateway Upgrade project last month.”
• “Which jobs have claimed less than their contract value but spent more than budget?”
• “Compare this quarter’s actuals to budget across all our jobs.”

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What it does not do

• It does not replace Business Central. Business Central remains the system of record; Demiton reads it, keeps a register of what it read, and writes back only through a governed, audited workflow.
• It does not create a delivery project for work you never tendered. In Projects, a project is born from a declared win, never created blank.
• Private and subcontract work still appears, because your ERP knows about it. Jobs that never came through a public tender are recorded on project_list from Business Central, Assignar or KeyPay, so their costs and diaries are still queryable. You do not have to have tendered a job for its numbers to show.
• A blank cost figure is not a zero. If a job has no ledger entries in a period, the register does not invent a budget or an actual for it.
• Margin depends on the cost categories your ERP posts. If a cost is coded to a job incorrectly in Business Central, the register reflects that; it does not re-code it.

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Scope a Connected deployment and we will tell you what your Business Central job structure will actually show.