There is more than one way to report on Business Central data, and choosing the wrong one hurts not in the first months but once the data grows.
01. Three Routes
A direct OData connection, virtual tables through Dataverse, or transfer into a data warehouse. All three work; they differ on scale and freshness needs.
02. Where OData Fits
Fastest to set up. Adequate for small data sets and a handful of reports. But once row counts pass the hundreds of thousands, refresh times climb quickly and you run into API call limits.
03. The Dataverse Layer
Exposing BC tables to Dataverse as virtual tables lets Power Apps and Power Automate share the same data. Its real value is for firms that want a common customer record with the CRM side.
04. The Data Warehouse Route
For a firm doing serious reporting this is the right answer. A daily or hourly transfer is set up from BC into a Fabric Lakehouse or Azure SQL, and Power BI feeds from there. It also removes load from the ERP.
05. The Star Schema Requirement
Whichever route you take, don't move BC's normalised table structure straight into Power BI. Without a star schema separated into dimension and fact tables, performance and DAX authoring will remain a problem.