"Start Year cannot be later than " (Date Table)

When you set a Start Year on the Connector's Date Table setup, Business Central rejects it:

Start Year cannot be later than 2006, because there are entries posted in 2006. Setting a later year would exclude them from the date table.

The year is the earliest posting year in your data, so it differs per environment.

Why this happens

The Connector checks the Start Year against the earliest posting date in G/L Entry, Value Entry and the legacy data tables, and refuses any later year.

The Start Year is the first year of the Date table in the Power BI semantic model, and every fact table relates to it through the posting date. Balances to date – G/L balances, inventory on hand, receivables – sum every entry up to the selected date, starting from the first one. Entries dated before the Date table starts fall outside every date filter, so those balances come out wrong by exactly those entries, and year-to-date, prior-year and rolling-period measures break the same way.

The Date table therefore has to run without gaps from the earliest posting date in Business Central to the last future year. The validation stops a Start Year that would silently corrupt those calculations.

How to find the earliest posting date in Business Central

1. Search (Tell Me) for General Ledger Entries and open the page.

2. Choose the Posting Date column header, then Ascending. The first row is the earliest G/L posting date.

3. Repeat for Value Entries. Its earliest date can differ, for example when opening inventory was posted earlier than the opening G/L balances.

4. If you have loaded legacy data, check those tables the same way.

Shortcut: filter Posting Date with ..31/12/2015 (your regional date format) to list everything posted before 2016.

The earliest year found is the latest Start Year the Connector accepts. Repeat it in each company included in Power BI and take the earliest year across all of them.

What to do

Accept the Start Year the Connector requires and refresh the Power BI semantic model so the Date table is rebuilt over the full range. This holds whether the early entries are genuine (opening balances, migrated history) or a mistyped date such as 2006 for 2016: posted G/L and value entries cannot be edited or deleted, and reversing one adds new entries without removing the original, so the earliest posting date stays.

A longer Date table costs nothing noticeable: each extra year adds 365 rows, so ten years is about 3,650 rows. The Connector does not allow a later Start Year, because a Date table that starts too late gives wrong balances rather than an error.