Shipping Analytics for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamic Ship Analysis is a free Power BI report built on your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central shipment data. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. It gives your team four dedicated views: Margin Analysis, Carrier Analysis, Geo Summary, and Data Explorer. Shipping managers, controllers, and operations leaders use it to see freight cost, freight recovered, and freight margin by carrier, customer, service, and region, without building a spreadsheet from scratch. It runs on data Dynamic Ship already captures at the point of shipment.
At a Glance
- See freight cost, freight recovered, and freight margin broken out by carrier, service, customer, and region.
- Drill into four dedicated views: Margin Analysis, Carrier Analysis, Geo Summary, and Data Explorer.
- Track cost per shipment and freight margin trends year over year.
- Included free with Dynamic Ship, built on Power BI, and ready to extend.
Have a Question about Shipping Analytics?
Key Capabilities
Freight Margin Analysis view. Freight margin, freight recovered, freight cost, cost per shipment, and shipment count, each with a year-over-year comparison, plus freight recovery broken out by customer and by carrier.
Carrier Analysis view. Cost per shipment, carriers used, best average margin carrier, and highest and lowest cost service, alongside a chart comparing freight charged, freight cost, and freight margin carrier by carrier.
Geo Summary view. A shipment destination map where bubble size indicates volume and shading indicates freight cost, plus a region and city-level breakdown of shipments, average cost per shipment, cost trend, total freight cost, recovered, and margin.
Data Explorer view. A raw, shipment-level data grid with tracking link, shipping label link, ship-to city and country, freight cost, freight recovered, freight margin, and weight, for teams that want shipment-level detail or plan to build their own report on top.
Shipment trend and weight distribution. Every view includes shipment volume trends over time and a breakdown of shipments by weight band, so patterns in volume or package size are visible alongside cost.
Carrier and shipment method mix. See which carriers and shipment methods (parcel, LTL freight, third-party billed, and more) account for your shipment volume, so you know where spend is concentrated.
How Shipping Analytics Works in Dynamic Ship
Setup has two parts: installing the Dynamic Ship Analysis extension inside Business Central, then installing and connecting the Power BI app.
- Install the Dynamic Ship Analysis extension in Business Central, which exposes the queries the Power BI report needs.
- Install the Dynamic Ship Analysis app from the Microsoft Marketplace in Power BI.
- Enter your Business Central company name, environment, and fiscal year settings, then sign in with your Business Central credentials to connect the report to live data.
- Open the report and move between the Margin Analysis, Carrier Analysis, Geo Summary, and Data Explorer views, or filter any of them by period, customer, shipping location, carrier, service, or shipment method.
Dynamic Ship Analysis is available for Business Central Cloud environments running Dynamic Ship 2.5 or newer. On-premises environments aren’t supported.
Why Dynamic Ship Shipping Analytics Stands Out
Most shipping conversations about freight reporting start with invoice auditing: importing the carrier’s electronic invoice and checking it line by line for overcharges. That’s a narrower question than the one that actually affects your margin. Dynamic Ship Analysis is built to answer the bigger question: whether you’re making or losing money on shipping, broken down by carrier, customer, service, and region, with freight margin and freight recovered tracked as first-class metrics alongside cost.
It’s also free. There’s no separate license, no added module cost, and no per-report fee. If you already run Dynamic Ship on Business Central Cloud with a Power BI Pro license, the report and all views are available for installation and connection today.
Who Uses Shipping Analytics
Shipping managers use the Carrier Analysis view to spot which carriers or service levels are eating into margin before the trend shows up in quarterly numbers. Controllers and finance teams use the Margin Analysis view to verify that freight billing rules are recovering costs as intended. Operations leaders use the Geo Summary view to see where shipment volume and cost concentrate by city and region. Analysts and account teams use the Data Explorer view when they need shipment-level detail to answer a specific customer or carrier question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Dynamic Ship Analysis is a free Power BI template app included with Dynamic Ship. You need a Power BI Pro license to run Power BI itself and a Business Central Cloud environment running Dynamic Ship 2.5 or newer, but there’s no additional fee for the app or the report.
No. Dynamic Ship stores the actual freight cost, freight recovered, and freight margin per shipment and surfaces them through Dynamic Ship Analysis, so your team can compare them against carrier invoices. It does not import the carrier’s electronic invoice or automatically audit individual charges.
No. Dynamic Ship Analysis is available for Business Central Cloud environments running Dynamic Ship 2.5 or newer. On-premises environments aren’t currently supported.
Yes. The Data Explorer view lists every shipment with tracking and label links, ship-to detail, freight cost, freight recovered, freight margin, and weight, so you can inspect individual shipments or export the detail for further analysis.