If you share Jet Reports with colleagues, the version they receive is usually the run output: numbers, formatting, and a set of formulas that only make sense if you already know what is behind them. To see or change the logic, the recipient needs a Jet Designer licence and the design version of the workbook. An Excel report for Business Central should not work that way. The tables, fields, filters and joins that produced every figure should be written into the workbook itself, readable by anyone who opens it and editable by anyone with a licence.
In a demo with a US Business Central partner in September 2026, a controller put it plainly: "Brian builds a report, saves it and shares it with me. If I want to change it and he hasn't shared the table behind it, I can't." Everyone in the room nodded. Not one person asked what she meant. They had all lived it.
That nod is the subject of this article. It is not really a complaint about Jet Reports. It is a complaint about a way of working in which one person owns the logic and everyone else owns a copy of the answer.
Jet Reports draws a line between two states of a workbook. In Design Mode, a licensed Designer builds the report using functions such as NL for lists of records, NF for field values and GL for account balances. In Report Mode, the report has been run and the workbook shows the results. Jet's own documentation is careful about the difference: changes made in Report Mode are lost when the report is run again, and results shown in Design Mode are described as optimized for speed rather than guaranteed to reflect every query accurately.
Users who have the add-in but no Designer licence are Report Viewers. They can run and read; they cannot rebuild. So when Brian saves and shares his report, what his colleague receives is, in practice, the output of a run. If she wants to swap a field, tighten a date filter or add a company, she needs two things she does not have: a Designer licence and Brian's design version. Without both, the report is editable by one person, whatever the licence count on paper says.
This is not a bug in Jet. It is a design choice that made sense when a reporting team was one Jet specialist and a room full of consumers. It stops making sense when three controllers each need to adjust the same monthly pack.
The licence problem is visible. The knowledge problem is not. Open a report someone built last year and try to answer basic questions. Were intercompany postings excluded, or is that why the margin looks high? Is the posting date range fixed to a fiscal year or relative to today? Is "Balance (LCY)" in the customer list a stored value or a flowfield calculated at run time, and if it is a flowfield, what date filter was applied to it?
In a workbook where the logic is not readable, those answers live in the head of whoever built it. When that person moves to another job, the report keeps running. It just stops being explainable. Auditors notice this before the finance team does, usually in the form of a question nobody can answer without rebuilding the report from scratch.
The practical test of any shared Excel report is simple: what can the recipient do with it? The table below compares the run output of a Jet report received by a Report Viewer with an Exsion workbook received with or without a licence. The Jet column describes the typical experience of a Report Viewer and should be checked against your own Jet configuration and report design.
[[TABLE_START]]
The recipient wants to | Jet run output (Report Viewer) | Exsion workbook, no licence | Exsion workbook, with licence
Read the numbers | Yes | Yes | Yes
See which Business Central table and fields were used | Requires Design Mode and a Designer licence | Yes, in the grid | Yes, in the grid
See the filters applied to each field | Requires Design Mode and a Designer licence | Yes, in the grid | Yes, in the grid
See how a flowfield was calculated | Not shown in the run output | Yes, in the grid | Yes, in the grid
Change a filter and refresh | No (Report Mode changes are lost on rerun; Designer licence needed) | No refresh; can read and note the change needed | Yes, edit in place and refresh
Rename or swap a field | No (Designer licence and design version needed) | No | Yes
Move a pivot, change pivot filters, drill into rows | Depends on report design | Yes, on pivot-only workbooks | Yes
Open Business Central at the exact entries behind a cell | Depends on report design | Yes, Show Details on results | Yes, Show Details on results
[[TABLE_END]]
In Exsion Reporting, every query is written into the workbook as a plain, readable grid. One of our consultants calls it "the friend of the controller", and the name has stuck internally because it describes what it does. The grid shows the Business Central table, the company or companies, the fields, the filter on each field, any joins to other tables, and the way each flowfield is calculated.
Take a customer list. The grid shows table 18 (Customer), the fields you chose, and next to "Balance (LCY)" the fact that it is a flowfield summing amounts from Detailed Cust. Ledg. Entry (table 379) under whatever date filter you set. A colleague opening the file does not have to guess whether that balance is stored or calculated. It says so. If a join is present, it appears in blue with the key it uses, for instance Cust. Ledger Entry "Customer No." to Customer "No.", which is covered in more depth in how to join Business Central tables in Excel.
Filters use Business Central's own syntax, so a posting date filter reads 01-01-26..31-03-26 and a wildcard reads exactly as it would in a Business Central page. Anyone who has ever typed a filter in Business Central can read the grid without training. Microsoft documents that syntax on Microsoft Learn, and it is the same syntax in the workbook.
Because the definition is in the file, changing it is an edit, not a rebuild. Want city instead of country on the customer report? Change the field in the grid and refresh. Your US colleagues want the column called "ZIP" rather than "Post Code"? Rename the header in the grid; the data underneath still comes from the same field. Need the same report for two more companies in the group? Tick them in the grid and the result comes back with a company column.
None of this requires the person who originally built the report. It also does not require remembering how they built it, because the grid is the documentation.
Sharing the workbook shares everything. A recipient with an Exsion licence can edit the grid and refresh against Business Central. A recipient without a licence can still open the file, read every line of the definition, move a pivot, change pivot filters and double-click a pivot cell to see the underlying rows, provided that subset is under about a million rows. What they cannot do is refresh. If a file needs to leave the finance team entirely, the Formulas to Values command converts every Exsion formula to a static number, and the workbook opens as an ordinary spreadsheet anywhere.
Refresh, in turn, runs under the reader's own Business Central permissions, not the author's. How that works, and why there is no separate security model to maintain, is covered in live Business Central data in Excel without a data warehouse.
Most teams buy a reporting tool for speed or for the row limit. The benefit they mention a year later is usually a different one: the reports explain themselves, and three things follow from that.
Handover stops being a project. When a controller leaves, the next person opens the monthly pack, reads the grid, and knows within minutes which tables and filters produced each tab. There is no knowledge transfer document to write, because the workbook is the document.
Review gets faster. An auditor or a finance director who wants to know why a figure moved can see the definition next to the result rather than asking someone to check. A question that used to take a day of back and forth takes a glance.
Drift stops. Hidden definitions rot silently: a filter that made sense in 2024 keeps being applied in 2026 because nobody can see it. A visible definition gets challenged the first time it looks wrong, which is the point of having one.
This is the difference between an Excel report that is fast and an Excel report that is auditable. Only one of those survives a change of staff.
A readable definition tells you what the report was meant to do. Drill down tells you what it actually did. On any Exsion financial function, Show Details opens Business Central filtered to exactly the G/L account and posting date range the cell used. The same applies to query results. If a cell in the trial balance says the marketing cost for March is 48,200, one click shows the G/L entries that add up to that number, in Business Central, under your own permissions.
That is the second half of auditability. The grid shows the intent; the drill down shows the evidence. A step-by-step walkthrough is in how to drill down to transactions in Excel for Business Central.
The reasonable objection at this point is that your existing Jet reports contain years of logic, and rebuilding them by hand is exactly the project you are trying to avoid. That is why Exsion uses AI to extract the list of tables and fields a Jet workbook touches and rebuild it as an Exsion grid. The result is a query definition you can read and adjust, sitting inside the new workbook. For teams coming from Jet Reports, the first report is built together with an Exsion consultant free of charge, so the migration begins with a working pack rather than a blank sheet.
The install itself takes about five minutes: Exsion Reporting is installed from AppSource through Extension Management in Business Central, the Excel add-in is downloaded from the Exsion page inside Business Central, and a trial licence arrives by email within about a minute. The full 30-day trial and pricing are on the pricing page, and the product overview is on the Exsion Reporting product page.
Shared reports that cannot be edited are one of five reasons finance teams look for a Jet Reports alternative for Business Central. The others, the Excel row limit, slow reports that lock up Excel, joining tables without a Designer licence, and reporting on live data without a warehouse, are covered in the pillar article: Jet Reports alternative for Business Central in 2026.
Back to the controller in the room. Her problem was never that Brian was slow to share. It was that what he shared could not explain itself. A report that carries its own definition is one she can change on Tuesday without waiting for Brian on Friday, and one an auditor can read in 2028 without either of them.
[[FAQ_START]]
Can a colleague edit a Jet report I share with them? | Only if they have a Jet Designer licence and the design version of the workbook. A recipient with the Jet add-in but no Designer licence is a Report Viewer who can run and read the report. Jet's documentation notes that changes made in Report Mode are lost when the report is run again.
What is the difference between Design Mode and Report Mode in Jet Reports? | Design Mode is where a licensed Designer builds and edits the report using Jet functions such as NL, NF and GL. Report Mode is the state after the report has been run, showing results. Jet's own documentation states that Design Mode results are optimized for speed and not guaranteed to reflect every query accurately, and that Report Mode edits do not survive a rerun.
How does Exsion make a Business Central Excel report auditable? | Every query definition is written into the workbook as a readable grid showing the table, companies, fields, filters, joins and flowfield calculations. Anyone opening the file can read it, and Show Details opens Business Central filtered to the exact account and posting date range behind a cell. The definition and the evidence both sit one click from the number.
Can someone without an Exsion licence open a shared workbook? | Yes. They can read the full query definition, move pivots, change pivot filters and double-click into the underlying rows on pivot-only workbooks. Refreshing against Business Central requires a licence, and the Formulas to Values command converts a file to static numbers for distribution outside the finance team.
How do I see how a flowfield is calculated in an Excel report? | In the Exsion grid, each flowfield shows the table and filter it sums. For example, Customer "Balance (LCY)" in table 18 is shown as a sum over Detailed Cust. Ledg. Entry (table 379) under the date filter you set. That calculation is visible to anyone who opens the workbook.
Will I lose my existing Jet report logic if I switch to Exsion? | Exsion uses AI to extract the tables and fields a Jet workbook uses and rebuilds them as an Exsion grid you can read and adjust. For teams moving from Jet Reports, the first report is rebuilt together with Exsion free of charge.
[[FAQ_END]]