Fenlex Corporate Services Closes the Gap Left by Business Central’s APIs with Popdock

Fenlex is a full corporate services provider in Malta, offering expertise across corporate, tax, accounting, advisory, liquidation, and other services a company may need during its lifespan. Fenlex was founded in the late 1980s, when its sister law firm, Fenech & Fenech Advocates, recognized a unique opportunity to provide a full suite of services.

Fenlex has expanded into B2B solutions over the past decade, partnering with international corporate and trust providers to help them serve their own clients more efficiently. Today, Fenlex is one of the largest independent corporate service providers (CSPs) in Malta.

Luke Buttigieg, the Operations Supervisor at Fenlex, focuses on reporting and automation for the company. His day-to-day consists of helping users get the most out of its ERP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, through tools like Microsoft Power BI and Power Automate. The reporting and automation work has been front and center as Fenlex navigated through an ERP transition and the data challenges that came with it.

Before using Popdock, Fenlex relied primarily on Power BI for reporting. While Power BI is great for building dashboards, it doesn’t provide live data, so Luke had to find a way to fill that gap. He found an answer with Excel, since it can refresh connections on demand, but those Excel workbooks still couldn’t be embedded directly into Business Central. Because of this, Fenlex was left with scattered reporting across multiple tools.

An even bigger issue they were facing was with Business Central’s APIs themselves. Certain data fields Fenlex needed lived in the underlying tables but weren’t exposed through the API. Luke had to search for workarounds or ask Fenlex’s Business Central supplier to update the API, with no guarantee it would happen. On top of that, the APIs couldn’t be pre-filtered before loading into Power BI, so they had to pull large amounts of data and filter it afterward, increasing refresh times and causing major frustration.

Additionally, Fenlex migrated from Acumatica to Business Central in October 2025 as part of a company-wide ERP consolidation initiative. This resulted in losing the built-in reporting capabilities they relied on in Acumatica. Considering the reporting gaps, Fenlex needed a way to recreate nearly a decade’s worth of reports and automations.

Fenlex’s Business Central implementation consultant recommended Popdock to help with these challenges, and Popdock’s Business Central widget proved to be an invaluable tool. “It makes it easier,” said Luke. “We can just pick and choose whichever data fields we need to show in our reports. We’re not restricted, and the data’s live.” Now, Fenlex can even include fields never exposed through Business Central’s native APIs.

While Fenlex still uses Power BI on its own for dashboard creation, they discovered they could pair it with Popdock for an even more powerful solution. Popdock’s Query Builder serves as the starting point for their reports, allowing them to select exactly which tables and fields they want to include, set the required filters, and choose which columns to show.

Popdock provides the flexible, pre-filtered data access they need, and Power BI gives them the visualization they desire. That same flexibility has carried over to other integrations as well. They were even able to use Power BI Report Builder with public APIs built with Popdock to create a customer statement report entirely in-house.

That let us be more flexible in terms of doing what we wanted to do without reaching out to our Business Central supplier and explaining what we need and waiting for them to do it.

Luke Buttigieg, Operations Supervisor

Luke builds the reports himself, while the dashboards created are used broadly across the organization. When asked what Popdock characteristics stood out to him the most, he cited a few key features. “I like the user interface in general. It’s quite easy to navigate,” said Luke. “I also like writing favorites, so you can use one list with different views of the same list instead of needing to create the same list more than once.”

With Popdock, Fenlex is able to pick and choose the data fields it needs without restriction, work with live data integrated directly through the Business Central widget, and build reports without waiting on its supplier’s timeline. By combining Popdock and Power BI, Fenlex was able to remove the friction from a process that used to require workarounds at nearly every turn.

If you’re using Business Central, I think it’s [Popdock] a must if you need live and flexible access to your data directly within Business Central.

Luke Buttigieg, Operations Supervisor

Looking ahead, Fenlex is continuing to use Popdock to rebuild the reporting and automation they developed over nearly a decade on its previous ERP. During that process and beyond, eOne Solutions is committed to supporting Fenlex as they expand on what they build.