From Zero to Live Dashboard: Deploying Aurora BI on Business Central in an Afternoon

When we say Aurora BI goes from ERP connection to live dashboard in hours, that is not marketing copy — it is a description of the actual process. Here is what a real deployment looks like, step by step.

The Setup: A Multi-Branch Retailer on Business Central

The client runs eight retail branches across two countries, all on Business Central. Before Aurora BI, the operations manager spent every Monday morning collecting Excel exports from each branch, merging them manually, and distributing a report that was already two days out of date before anyone read it. Finance had no real-time visibility into which branches were profitable and which were not.

Step 1: Connect (15 minutes)

Aurora BI connected to their Business Central environment via the standard BC API. No on-premise agent was needed — they were running BC SaaS. The connection was authenticated, tested, and confirmed in under 15 minutes.

Step 2: Schema Discovery (45 minutes)

The AI engine walked the entire BC database — 820 standard tables plus their custom extension tables and localisation fields. It classified every table as a fact or dimension, inferred relationships, and flagged the 27 core fact tables and 19 dimension tables relevant for a retail analytics warehouse. No manual mapping. No SQL.

Step 3: Warehouse Design and ETL Generation (1 hour)

Aurora designed a ClickHouse star-schema warehouse with 51 fact tables and 51 dimension tables, then generated 102 ETL pipelines to keep it synchronised with BC. The whole design was reviewed and approved in the platform — no code was written.

Step 4: Dashboards (2 hours)

With the warehouse running, Aurora generated 21 dashboards covering Sales, Inventory, Finance, Customers, and Branch Performance. All eight branches appeared on a single consolidated view. The ops manager asked "which branch had the lowest margin last week?" in plain English and got a chart with the answer in seconds.