Enable Incremental Refresh Support for Dynamics 365 Business Central in Power BI

Agreed, your pain is real. It's worth noting though that the missing piece isn't just timestamp fields. Business Central's OData APIs also lack robust support for server-side change detection (e.g., delta tokens or CDC), which means even if those fields existed natively, incremental refresh would still require significant client-side logic to work reliably at scale.

The deeper ask here is for Microsoft to treat Business Central as a first-class analytical data source and not just a transactional system. Until then, orgs serious about performance should consider bypassing the connector entirely and moving to a proper data integration layer (Fabric pipelines, Azure Data Factory, etc) that can handle delta loads more gracefully than OData ever will.

Hi sumitmanjarme ,

Incremental Refresh in Power BI works well when source tables expose reliable “Created Date/Time” or “Last Modified Date/Time” fields, but Business Central’s standard APIs and OData endpoints don’t consistently provide these. Try to use custom APIs, audit fields, or splitting historical vs. current data.  

At present, there’s no native change tracking for Business Central tables, so refresh scenarios can be complex. The best practice is to add custom date fields or extensions that allow Power BI to detect new/changed records. Many users have requested Microsoft to add system-managed fields across key tables, which would make incremental loading much more seamless.  

Until native support is introduced, custom extensions or API-based workarounds remain the recommended approach.

Thanks,

Sai Teja