Fabric and Power BIOne copy of your ERP data. Reports finance trusts.
Microsoft Fabric puts your ERP, CRM and spreadsheet data in one place, OneLake, and runs Power BI on top of it. QServices sizes the capacity, gets Dynamics GP, Business Central or SYSPRO data in, and tells you plainly when Power BI Pro on its own is cheaper.
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's data platform, rented as capacity by the hour. It brings OneLake (one store for all your data), pipelines, lakehouses, warehouses, real-time data and Power BI under one licence and one set of permissions. Microsoft reported 35,000 paid Fabric customers in April 2026.
Fabric is billed per capacity unit (CU) per hour. These are US East list prices in October 2026; other regions differ.
| F2 | F8 | F64 | Power BI Pro only | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity units | 2 | 8 | 64 | None |
| Pay as you go, running all month | About $263 | About $1,051 | About $8,410 | None |
| Reserved for one year | About $156 | About $625 | About $5,003 | None |
| People who only view reports | Need Pro, $14 each | Need Pro, $14 each | A free licence is enough | Pro, $14 each |
| Lakehouse, warehouse, pipelines, mirroring | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Copilot and data agents | Yes | Yes | Yes | Only billed to a capacity |
Pay as you go assumes 730 hours. Microsoft quotes about 41% off for a reservation, but unused reserved hours are lost. OneLake storage is extra at $0.026 per GB a month (hot) and keeps billing while a capacity is paused. Usage past the limit can be billed at three times the rate, $0.54 per CU-hour. Power BI Pro rose from $10 to $14 on 1 April 2025.
Five questions. Plenty of mid-sized finance teams don't need Fabric yet.
Do your reports need data from more than one system, like the ERP plus CRM, bank or spreadsheets?
Would ERP data refreshed eight times a day be too slow?
Will more than about 350 people view reports?
Do you want Copilot or data agents answering questions about your numbers?
Is one ERP the only source, with a few GB of data at most?
Answer the questions to see what fits.
Start on an F2 or F4, mirror the ERP into OneLake, and grow the capacity only when the metrics app says so.
Book a two-week assessmentRun the report that hurts most, often AR or month-end, on a small capacity for a quarter. Then compare the bill with Pro.
At $14 a user, Pro covers one ERP and a handful of reports. We build the model so it can move to Fabric later without a rebuild.
Each ERP has its own route. Some are built in, some need the on-premises gateway, and a few have no native route yet.
| Route into Fabric | How fresh | Watch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, Finance and Operations | Link to Fabric from Dataverse, with no copy jobs to build | Most changes within about 10 minutes; invoice runs up to about 90 | Uses Dataverse database capacity; finance and operations tables are added by hand |
| Business Central | Native mirroring: preview from November 2026, general availability planned for April 2027 | A few minutes, according to early reports | Until it ships, we use the Business Central APIs through Data Factory |
| Dynamics GP, SYSPRO and Epicor on SQL Server | SQL Server mirroring (2016 to 2022, through change data capture) via the on-premises gateway | Changes published as often as every 15 seconds | Long transactions can grow the SQL log; the gateway must be version 3000.214.2 or later |
| SAP S/4HANA and ECC | Mirroring through SAP Datasphere | Near real time | SAP Datasphere outbound pricing applies |
| SAP Business One and cloud Epicor Kinetic | No native route: the gateway with SQL or HANA connectors, or a third-party tool | Scheduled | Planned table by table, with the trade-offs written down |
Mirroring's replication compute is free, and each capacity unit includes 1 TB of mirroring storage. Querying mirrored data uses capacity as normal.
Most Fabric surprises come from four places. We price all four before you commit.
An F-SKU price per month.
Storage, licences, overages and throttling that show up later.
Surge protection, overage limits and a pause schedule go in before the first report ships. The capacity metrics app sends no alerts itself, so we wire alerts to capacity events.
Capacity starts with F2 at about $263 a month pay as you go (US East list price), or about $156 a month reserved for a year. Most finance use cases start between F2 and F8. Add OneLake storage at $0.026 per GB a month, and Pro licences for report viewers below F64.
Below F64, yes: everyone who views reports needs Pro or Premium Per User. From F64 up, people with a free licence and the Viewer role can view reports. Anyone who creates or shares reports always needs Pro.
Microsoft no longer sells Premium P SKUs. Each one ends with its agreement: 30 days of grace, then throttling, and from day 91 operations are rejected until workspaces move to an F SKU. A P1 matches an F64.
Yes. A capacity can be paused by hand or on a schedule. Pausing bills any smoothed usage straight away, and OneLake storage keeps billing while it's paused.
GP runs on SQL Server, so we mirror its database through the on-premises gateway (SQL Server 2016 to 2022). Business Central's native mirroring is in preview from November 2026, with general availability planned for April 2027. Until then we use its APIs.
Copilot in Fabric runs on Azure OpenAI in the US and the EU Data Boundary. For capacities in Canada or India, prompts are processed in the US once an admin turns on cross-geo processing. We review that setting with you before Copilot goes on.
With one ERP, a few GB of data and fewer than about 50 report viewers, Power BI Pro at $14 a user is usually cheaper. Fabric pays off when you combine systems, need fresher data or have hundreds of viewers.
Facts on this page checked on 27 October 2026.
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