Two Reporting Engines, One Data Source

AstraReports now supports two reporting engines inside Acumatica: SAP Crystal Reports and Microsoft Power BI. Both run against the same Acumatica data through Pixis Generic Inquiries, so the choice of engine is about the kind of output you want, not a different way of connecting to your ERP. Crystal Reports remains the right tool for pixel-perfect, print-ready financial documents. Power BI adds interactive dashboards, data exploration, and paginated reports built on Microsoft Fabric. This article walks through the one-time setup that connects your Acumatica instance to Power BI.

You will complete the setup in three places: Microsoft Entra (to register AstraReports as a trusted application), Acumatica (to store the connection credentials), and the Power BI service (to create a workspace the integration can publish to).

Before You Begin

The Power BI setup touches your Microsoft tenant, so make sure you have the right access before you start. You will need administrative rights in Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory) to register an application and grant API permissions, a Power BI account with permission to create workspaces, and a Microsoft Fabric or Power BI license (a Fabric Trial workspace works for evaluation). You will also need the AstraReports (Pixis) extension already installed and licensed in Acumatica.

Step 1: Register the Application in Microsoft Entra

Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center at entra.microsoft.com and register a new application that represents AstraReports.

• Go to App registrations and choose + New registration.
• In the Name field, enter Astra Report.
• Click Register.

Step 2: Create a Client Secret

The client secret is the password AstraReports uses to authenticate with Power BI on your behalf.

• Open Certificates & secrets and choose + New client secret.
• In the Description field, enter Astra, then click Add.
• Copy the secret Value immediately and store it somewhere safe — you will paste it into Acumatica in Step 5, and Entra will not show the full value again after you leave the page.

Step 3: Grant Power BI API Permissions

AstraReports needs delegated permission to work with Power BI content on your behalf.

• Go to API permissions and choose + Add a permission.
• Select Power BI Service, then Delegated permissions.
• Enable the permissions the integration uses, including: App, Capacity, Catalog, CatalogMirroring, Code, Connections, Content, Dashboard, DataAgent, Dataflow, DataPipeline, Dataset, Fabric, Gateway, KQLDataconnection, MLModel, PaginatedReport, Pipeline, PrincipalDetails, Report, RetailDataManager, Semantic Model, Storage Account, Tenant, UserDataFunction, and WorkSpace.
• Click Add permissions.

Step 4: Copy the Client and Tenant IDs

You need two identifiers from the application’s overview page to finish the connection in Acumatica.

• Go to App registrations > Owned applications > Astra Report.
• Copy the Application (client) ID.
• Copy the Directory (tenant) ID.

Step 5: Enter the Credentials in Acumatica

Now bring the three values you collected into AstraReports.

• In Acumatica, go to Astra Report > Report Settings and open the Power BI tab.
• Populate the fields: Power BI Tenant = Directory (tenant) ID, Power BI Client ID = Application (client) ID, and Power BI Client Secret = the secret value from Step 2.
• Click Save. Saving also checks the connection, so a successful save confirms Acumatica can reach Power BI.

Step 6: Create a Power BI Workspace

Finally, give the integration a workspace to publish reports into.

• Sign in to the Power BI service at app.powerbi.com and go to Workspaces > + New workspace.
• Set the Name to Astra Report.
• Under Workspace settings, set Workspace type to Fabric Trial (or your licensed capacity).
• Choose Manage > Add people, add the Astra Report application (the same one you registered in Entra), set its role to Admin, and click Add.

You’re Connected

With the application registered, credentials saved in Acumatica, and a workspace ready, your Acumatica instance and Power BI are now linked. The next step is to build a report: choose Power BI as the report engine on a Generic Inquiry data source, create a dataset, and design a paginated report. See “Building Power BI Reports in AstraReports” for the full walkthrough.