Videos
Product demonstrations and worked examples for Lens and Xtract on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Subscribe on YouTubeTwo weeks to two days, on the monthly statements, at Five Thirty in Dubai. Lens is the reporting layer for finance teams on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: statements, margins, cash and trends, live from the ledger. Demo data: Culinary Ventures Group is an invented company.
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Lens, for Business Central. Lens turns your ledger into answers. Live from Business Central, nothing rebuilt. How are my gross margins against the same month last year? Which unit is best, and which is worst? The numbers sit in Business Central. But getting them out is the hard part.
Nothing exported, nothing rebuilt. So we built Lens on top of that ledger. Income statement. Revenue. Cost. Balance sheet. Trends. Everything you'd assemble at month end, we calculate continuously.
Every axis, every period. Every view can be sliced. By brand, by location, by outlet. This year against last. Or month against month. The filters are already there. No Analysis Views, no pivot tables.
Ask it like a person. When a number looks off, open Investigate and ask, in plain English. It shows every step of the calculation, and explains why it's right.
Bring your own AI. Want Claude or ChatGPT in the loop? We ship an MCP server, so they reach the same semantic model that powers Investigate.
Who sees what. You sign in with Microsoft. Admins set access. A brand manager or a branch head sees only what their job needs. And we never write back to Business Central.
Running in production today. 2 days to the monthly statements, down from two weeks at Five Thirty, Dubai. 8 brands, around 125 outlets, one finance team. Five Thirty in Dubai used to get its statements two weeks after month end. Now it's two days, and the time they got back goes into decisions.
Two weeks to two days, on the monthly statements. Book a 30-minute guided demo at zfenselabs.com. The guided demo runs on the Ember & Oud sandbox. Sign in with Microsoft, read-only, never writes to Business Central, unlimited users. That's Lens, by Zfense Labs. Give me half an hour, and I'll show you how it works in our sandbox.
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A family's wall calendar, January 2027. A child crosses out the first two weeks in red felt-tip and writes beside them: Papa's busy.
February, the first two weeks crossed out again: Busy again.
May, then October: the same two weeks crossed out every month, with no words now.
The child's drawing taped to the wall: Papa at his desk and screen, the child alone on the far side of the paper.
January 2028. Two days are crossed out, and the rest of the fortnight fills with plans: a playground, an ice cream, a sunny day, a heart. With Papa!
Father and daughter drawing together at the kitchen table.
What would you do with your two weeks back? Two weeks to two days, on the month-end statements. Lens by Zfense Labs.
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A Save As dialog for the January P&L. The same workbook is saved again every night for two weeks, each time under a name that promises it is the last: PnL_Jan_FINAL, v2, v3, FINAL_FINAL, ACTUALLY_FINAL, v7_DO_NOT_TOUCH, v9_reconciled_FIXED, until PnL_Jan_FINAL_FINAL_v10_USE_THIS_ONE no longer fits. The clock moves from 19:48 on the 1st to 04:05 on the 14th. A sticky note on the window: Which one is final??
A man alone at his desk at night, head in his hands, a tower of paper cups beside the laptop.
Lens, the Performance screen. The month picker steps through February, March and April and the income statement refreshes each time, no file named. A sticky note: Go.
The same man at a café table in the sun, a coffee in his hands, phone face down.
What would you do with your two weeks back? Two weeks to two days, on the month-end statements. Lens by Zfense Labs.
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What would you do if you got your two weeks back? Two weeks to two days.
Five Thirty in Dubai, runs eight brands, over a hundred outlets, all on Business Central.
Every month, income statements, cash flow, balance sheets and reconciliations for every brand were prepared manually in Excel. Same reports, same structures, just new numbers. It took two weeks every month.
Now Lens builds them straight from the ledger, in just two days.
I'm Avradip, founder of Zfense Labs. If your finance team rebuilds the same reports every month, I'd love to connect. What would you do if you got your two weeks back?
February was the best month on record, until Amira ranked every restaurant by margin. Two questions in the Lens Investigate tab and two in Claude on the same MCP server take a wall of green apart and put a price on one restaurant. Ember & Oud is an invented company; the figures are illustrative.
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February was the best month Ember and Oud ever had. Then the finance lead asked to see every restaurant ranked by margin.
First, plainly: Ember and Oud is not a real company. It is the sandbox we use to demonstrate Lens. An invented restaurant group with a realistic ledger, so we can show a real investigation without showing you somebody else's books.
Six brands, fourteen restaurants, one commissary kitchen, all of it in Business Central. On March third, Amira, the group's finance lead, opened Lens expecting a routine read. Revenue up fifty-nine percent. Margin up one point six. A screen full of green.
Two rows stopped her. Verde Blends, the only brand in red. And Unallocated, which is cost nobody has assigned to a restaurant yet, showing the biggest green number on the screen. If a residue can swing four hundred fifty-three points, how much of this green is real?
She did not build a report. She opened the Investigate tab and asked: Rank all outlets by gross margin for February 2026. Lens computed the ranking on the spot, every restaurant plus the Unallocated bucket. Verde Blends' two restaurants came out next to each other, ten points apart. Same menu, same kitchen, same suppliers.
Then she asked: Compare VRD0001 and VRD0002 for February 2026, revenue, COGS and gross margin. Straight from the restaurant P and L, reconciled to the dashboard. The two sell within eight percent of each other, so the whole gap is food cost.
Investigate had done its job, but her next questions were not lookups. So she opened Claude, connected to the same MCP server Lens runs on. She asked: Using the Zfense MCP for Ember and Oud: apply February 2026's brand-level gross margins to January's revenue mix. What would group gross margin have been, and how much of the actual decline is mix rather than trading?
The first thing Claude did was disagree with the question. As reported, margin had risen. Strip out the Unallocated bucket and it had fallen, and the fall was entirely mix. The headline had been flattered by a residue shrinking, not by restaurants cooking better.
Then she went back to VRD0002 and asked: Using ZfenseMCP for Ember and Oud: VRD0002 runs 10 points below VRD0001 on the same menu. Quantify the excess cost per month and annualized, and confirm whether it is food cost or overhead.
Claude confirmed the read. The whole ten points is cost of goods, not overhead. Held at its twin's food cost rate, VRD0002 was carrying seventeen thousand nine hundred dirhams of excess cost a month. About two hundred fifteen thousand a year.
Then, unprompted, Claude gave three reasons not to take that number to a board yet, each one checkable against the ledger. The first: VRD0002 had been open a single month, so treat the figure as a ceiling, not a run rate. A dashboard gives you answers. It does not tell you what they cannot support.
One afternoon. Four questions. No report built, and nobody waiting on a specialist. Everything you have just watched runs on our sandbox. Book a thirty-minute guided demo and we will walk it end to end.
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