Exporting Your Business Data to Excel

If you want to work with your data from Business Central in Excel, you can open all lists in Excel and work with it there. Similarly, if you want to cancel your subscription for Business Central, you can export your data to Excel so that you can take it with you.

Opening Lists in Excel

You can open data in Excel from any journal, list, or worksheet. You just open the page that you want, and then choose Open in Excel. For example, open the list of customers (search for Customers), and then choose Open in Excel. Your browser will prompt you to open or save the generated Excel workbook.

Note

Use this option when you do not want to make changes and publish those changes back to Business Central.

Each list includes a number of columns, and the export to Excel will include any columns that are in your current view. If you want to add or remove columns before you open the list in Excel, you simply open the shortcut menu for any column and then specify which columns that you want to see. This list of columns is different for most lists, and it reflects the structure in the database where your data is stored. If you are not sure what type of data a certain column contains, you can add it to your view and then decide if you want to remove it again.

Edit Data in Excel

Your Business Central experience includes an add-in for Excel so you can edit data in Excel. For more information, see Analyzing Financial Statements in Microsoft Excel.

Exporting Data to Other Finance Systems

If you decide to cancel your subscription for Business Central, you can export your data to Excel and take it with you to your next finance system.

You can export all pages, of course, but that might be more than you really need. So consider exporting the following essential pages, and remember to add all columns as described earlier:

  • Chart of Accounts
  • Customers
  • Vendors
  • Banks
  • Items

If you want all your financial transactions as well, this is a large amount of data, so the export will often take more than a few minutes of time. The financial transactions are shown on the General Ledger Entries page.

We recommend that you also consider exporting data from the following pages:

  • Customer Ledger Entries
  • Vendor Ledger Entries
  • Bank Account Ledger Entries
  • Item Ledger Entries
  • General Posting Setup
  • Customer Posting Groups
  • Vendor Posting Groups
  • Item Posting Groups
  • Bank Posting Group
  • G/L Budgets
  • G/L Budget Entries
  • Sales Quotes
  • Sales Invoices
  • Purchase Invoices
  • Contacts
  • Salespeople
Note

If you have set up more than one company in Business Central, you must export the relevant data from each company.

Note

You must have at least one of the following permissions to open or edit data in Excel:

  • Permission set D365 Excel Export Action
  • System permission 6110 Allow Action Export To Excel.

For more information, see To get an overview of a user's permissions.

See Also

Canceling Your Subscription for Business Central
Importing Business Data from Other Finance Systems
Analyzing Financial Statements in Microsoft Excel
Finance
General Business Functionality
Working with Business Central