Velixo vs. Cosmos
Live reporting and writeback in native Excel. AI assistants. Multi API support. Automatic consolidation. No server infrastructure. No extra software.
Velixo connects directly to Business Central and puts live data into the Excel workbooks your finance team already uses. Pull any data, drill to transactions, push journals, budgets, forecasts, and allocations back from the same workbook, without leaving Excel. Fully self-service, with Budgeting built-in, AI assistants and a strong user experience.
Book your demoReal-Time Agility vs. Stale Data Warehouses
In the mid-market ERP space, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) serves as a robust operational hub, yet finance and operational teams frequently require specialized tools to extract, analyze, and manipulate their financial data. When evaluating reporting and data management solutions for Business Central, Velixo and Cosmos are often considered, yet they represent two fundamentally different philosophies
Velixo turns Excel into a real-time, bidirectional management console. It connects directly to your ERP, giving you real-time data and the power to push budgets and journals back to Business Central in seconds.
Cosmos is a traditional cloud data warehouse (ETL/ELT) platform. It extracts your data, moves it to a separate cloud storage layer, and requires you to manually “run” reports on staged, asynchronous data.
Cosmos helps you report and integrate with Power BI if you happen to know the backend database schema of Business Central – Velixo helps you actually run Finance and automate your daily manual tasks.
Where the difference becomes concrete
Query Data vs. Run Your Business
Ultimately, choosing between these systems is a choice between two distinct software philosophies. Cosmos functions as a traditional data warehouse tool, synchonizing Business Central data in the cloud and leveraging Excel for querying; Velixo establishes a live, bidirectional connection for finance-led workflows.
Velixo connects directly to Business Central, enabling real-time reporting and seamless drill-downs within Excel – no data warehouse, no latency, same user security – data is always up-to-date. At a high-level, what truly differentiates Velixo from Cosmos is:
- its simplicity and flexibility, enabling self-service and easy consolidations from only one interface: Excel!
- its bidirectional integration with Business Central, enabling budgeting and powerful workflows that any user can build themselves.
- its strong AI assistants, further enabling self-service and data analysis, while also automating query & report creation.
Coupled with dozens of pre-built report templates, the result is a faster, more intuitive reporting experience, with budgeting and writeback scenarios.
In short, Cosmos helps you build a data warehouse and query technical data with the help of IT. Velixo helps you run your business from Excel, with no IT involvement, at a fraction of the costs of Cosmos.
Don’t just trust our words!
Velixo is trusted by 3400+ companies (12,000+ users) using it every day. It is a G2 Leader on the Financial analysis Grid, and boasts the highest user satisfaction!
Common questions from teams evaluating Jet Reports
- Velixo:Velixo is designed for Excel users first. Rather than introducing a separate reporting paradigm, Velixo extends native Excel functionality with Business Central-specific functions that can be combined naturally with standard Excel formulas. Functions are purpose-built for Business Central reporting, making report creation faster and more intuitive. Velixo’s functions are also fully cell-based and refresh dynamically while reports are being designed or when filter values change, providing immediate feedback and a highly interactive reporting experience. Users work directly in Excel, with full visibility into formulas and calculations at all times. Importantly, multi-company data automatically consolidates within one workbook.
- Cosmos: Cosmos uses two distinct user roles (Designer and Viewer) and separates report creation from report consumption. In Viewer mode, report results are only refreshed when users explicitly “run” the report to pull data from the cloud storage layer. While Cosmos provides a Visual Query Builder, it offers no transparency on the underlying formulas, which can obscure how data is being calculated within the spreadsheet. Furthermore, because Cosmos relies on an external data warehouse structure, users are required to know and understand the underlying technical table schema of Business Central to successfully build advanced reports.
The Bottom Line:
Velixo offers a single, unified product and experience where every user can build, refresh, and fully own their reports without requiring specialized technical knowledge. This creates a true, finance-led self-service reporting environment that feels native to Excel. In contrast, Cosmos introduces a more segmented, IT-dependent approach that creates additional friction between designing, analyzing, and updating reports due to its platform complexity and strict separation of user tiers.
No, Cosmos does not provide any writeback functionality. Cosmos is strictly a read-only reporting and query platform. It cannot push budgets, general ledger journals, or table adjustments back into Business Central. Velixo fully supports bidirectional writebacks for journals, budgets, and all standard or custom ERP objects.
The result is a more efficient, controlled, and scalable process that saves time, reduces errors, and maximises the value of both Excel and Business Central.
No. Velixo is a single, lightweight product that integrates directly into your existing Excel application. It communicates straight with Business Central via secure web APIs, completely eliminating the cost, hardware, and maintenance overhead of an external data warehouse.
Velixo guarantees effortless governance by natively respecting the user security and access roles you have already set up inside Business Central. Cosmos operates on an external cloud database, which requires your IT department to manually replicate and continuously manage your ERP security rules inside Cosmos.
Velixo provides a significantly faster time-to-value and a lower total cost of ownership, with an estimated rapid 3-month ROI. On the other hand, Cosmos pricing is publicly available – implementations are substantially more expensive, typically averaging USD $8,000 to $10,000+ once you include necessary Power BI reporting add-ons.
See it with your own data
Bring an Intacct report, budget model, or allocation workflow your team runs today. We’ll rebuild it live in Velixo using your Intacct instance, your workbook structure, your data, so you can see exactly what changes and what stays the same.