Business Performance Planning (BPP) is a capability within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, designed to enhance business agility by supporting continuous planning, automated actions, and real-time analysis for faster, more informed decision-making.
Built on Power Platform and tightly integrated within the broader Microsoft technology stack, BPP enables users to create budgets, forecasts, strategic plans, and “what-if” scenarios using familiar tools like Power BI, Excel, Power Apps, and Teams.
One of its key advantages is flexibility—BPP supports both financial and non-financial planning, making it an ideal solution to accelerate a wide range of planning processes.
It accommodates hybrid budgeting models including top-down, bottom-up, and zero-based budgeting.
With configurable security, the tool is well-suited for collaborative planning involving multiple roles—such as preparers, reviewers, and approvers—coordinated through integrated workflows and governance mechanisms.
BPP also offers a powerful toolkit to build tailored Power BI dashboards and KPIs aligned with unique business needs. Setting up a planning process typically requires an understanding of your data architecture and how your dashboards are constructed.
Approach
During the webinar, the Microsoft speaker outlined five core principles that define the BPP approach:
- Connected: Integrates organization-wide data for unified planning and decision-making.
- Collaborative: Boosts agility with configurable workflows that bring teams together.
- Intuitive: Encourages adoption with familiar tools like Excel and the Power Platform.
- Intelligent: Leverages AI to transform data into actionable insights and visualizations.
- Secure: Centralizes data with role-based access and robust security controls.
Architecture
From a technical perspective, BPP’s architecture demonstrates how Microsoft’s technologies come together to support modern planning. As part of the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, BPP integrates natively with applications such as Sales, Customer Service, and Finance.
This ecosystem leverage includes Power BI, Excel, Dataverse, Power Automate, and Power Apps—not just for BPP, but across many implementation scenarios.
For instance, Power Automate is often used to create approval workflows, which connect seamlessly with Microsoft Teams and Outlook, bringing planning into the flow of everyday work.
Additionally, organizations can tap into Copilot experiences—available in tools like Power BI and Excel—with more AI-driven capabilities on the horizon for BPP.
Because BPP is built on Dataverse, it supports connectivity to virtually any data source. This allows organizations to incorporate key planning drivers from multiple systems, whether within Dynamics 365 (e.g., Sales, Customer Service) or external platforms, ERPs, or line-of-business apps.
Model and Connect
Effective planning with BPP centers around two essential areas: Model and Connect, and Collaborate and Act.
Model and Connect, Collaborate and Act!
The framework behind BPP includes clearly defined stages that guide how organizations can structure and execute their planning processes.
Model
The modeling stage begins in the Canvas application. Here, users can define dimensions and cubes, populate or manage dimension values, and configure security based on business needs.
Connect
BPP supports multiple methods of connecting and importing data into the system. Within the Canvas application, data can be entered directly into editable grids, imported via Excel, or—most powerfully—connected through dataflows.
Dataflows enable seamless integration with Dataverse entities and external data sources. For example, organizations can utilize entities such as the GL trial balance (available in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations) to support accurate and automated data imports.
These dataflows are embedded into the BPP experience, allowing users to bring data directly into Power BI and create dashboards that reflect their unique planning requirements with high flexibility.
Act
Once we’ve used Power BI Desktop to publish our dashboards, we can provide access to them—these dashboards include standard Power BI components along with seven predefined visuals that are unique to Business Performance Planning.
These specialized visuals enable users to edit data, review and report on data, copy data across different scenarios, and add comments to any changes being made—all while leveraging the power of Power BI. Similarly, Excel can also be used to interact with and analyze the data in a familiar environment.
Collaborate
Collaboration takes place through an editable, user-friendly interface. Users can also take advantage of the Business Performance Planning Excel add-in, which can be configured using a guided wizard to create an editable pivot table.
This allows users to work within a spreadsheet interface—similar to Matrix visuals in Power BI—should they prefer that format.
Furthermore, organizations can use Power Automate to build configurable workflows. This enables real-time collaboration by notifying reviewers and approvers (defined by role-based security) when their input or approval is required.
The updated status of plans can be tracked seamlessly, and the latest versions can be shared directly within Microsoft Teams or exported into PowerPoint, ensuring stakeholders across the organization stay informed with current and accurate information.