2025 Release Wave 1: Promising features coming to Business Central
Microsoft’s twice-annual release waves are always packed with Business Central features that can speed up workflows, make system use more straightforward or intuitive, and even improve base functionality. When release waves are announced, Microsoft also publishes documentation to help users understand what’s coming; however, this release wave documentation includes all features in the wave, and you may not always have time to dive headfirst into that particular pool.
For your convenience, our consultants here at Syvantis have reviewed the release wave and plucked a few of the gems that we’re most excited about and believe will impact users the most.
Update sandboxes to preview new BC versions
It’s easier than ever to test incoming BC updates to ensure they don’t impact your processes or customizations and, if they do, resolve those issues before the entire update is pushed into your production environment. Now you can update a sandbox environment during public preview to test and train your users on this new functionality. Public preview begins a month before the release of the update.
As you’re testing the incoming feature updates, keep in mind:
How your processes may change because of these apps
Are your extensions or customizations impacted by these changes
How you may leverage these new things in your company’s processes/workflows
Who on your team needs to be trained on this new functionality
Here’s a more comprehensive walkthrough of things to consider while release wave testing.
Remember that Microsoft cannot do what they do without their customers, and they encourage feedback on updates so they can fix bugs and make it as useful to as many customers as possible. Here’s how you provide feedback.
This change will be available for the public preview of the second release wave this year (2025 Release Wave 2).
Read more about updating sandboxes to preview updates.
Flexibility for updates management
Admin now have more flexibility and control to update their environments according to their business needs. This includes more time to prep for the updates and adjust their rollout to timeframes in which their business or industry are less busy. Now you have a five-month period for major updates so you can thoroughly test and prep before updates are implemented. In regards to minor updates, administrators can now choose when or if these updates take effect, and you can opt out of minor monthly updates.
However, this does change the grace period for after the major update period to one month—this is the latest that a major update can be postponed.
Learn more about these changes to update flexibility.
Your 1099 process within Business Central will shift due to the new electronic submission capability. Review the process as of 2024 and earlier here.
Submit 1099 forms electronically to the IRIS
Technically this is a 2024 Release Wave 2 feature. But this is an important and widely impactful feature, and with general availability set for March 2025, we would be remiss to leave it out of this release wave feature recap. Business Central now includes an embedded IRIS platform to allow for electronic submissions of your 1099 forms!
This does impact your 1099 process within Business Central, so it’s important to test this functionality outside of your fiscal year-end closing period. Wonderfully, this will help boost the efficiency of your tax management and reporting obligations and reduce manual data entry, errors, and delays.
If you’re a Syvantis client and have not already tested this feature in preparation for your next tax period, get in touch with us (earlier rather than later). We’re happy to help
Read more about the 1099 electronic submission functionality.
Enhanced Financial Reporting capabilities
The financial reporting capabilities in Business Central are no-code and provide Business Central users self-service reporting and statements. And, they are about to get even better! With this release, added functionality includes benefits to report viewer, creator, and admin-level users:
Report viewers:
Hide empty rows in the reports they are previewing and printing
Report owners:
Describe the report’s function via an internal description field
Add introduction and conclusion text for the report
Save Excel templates in Business Central
Schedule reports to run
Easily find reports that use a column or row definition
And more
Administrators:
See the permissions that are required to view the report
Access telemetry for a report’s usage and its lifecycle events
These changes will automatically apply to your environment once it becomes generally available.
Check out Microsoft’s documentation on this feature.
Purchase Order line matching with Copilot
As you likely already know, Copilot is used in many scenarios where you provide a prompt (or select one from a list), and Copilot goes to work searching for relevant data in your system, collating, organizing, and interpreting that data, and producing a composed and understandable result. We see this happening every time we use the “Chat with Copilot” feature or the reconcile with Copilot feature, for example.
Now Copilot can aid you by mapping and matching vendor invoices to purchase orders, which has the potential to cut down a lot of the time you may be spending on searching for and entering the appropriate lines.
Read more about purchase order line matching with Copilot.
Shopify Integration Upgrades
If you are currently using the Shopify connector or considering it for your e-commerce needs, the integration continues to grow in strength and flexibility. There are two integration features we want to highlight.
First is metafield import/export and mapping. The Shopify platform allows for data storage flexibility via metafields, where you can store additional information for products, customers, or companies unique to your e-commerce needs. Examples may be credit limit, loyalty program details, social URLs, and more. To more comprehensively flex for any commerce need, you can now import and export data stored in metafields within Shopify into Business Central. This new functionality is housed on the new Shopify Metafields page. You can also now map standard or custom fields, attributes, or related entries in BC to these metafields—this happens from the Shopify Shop Card, and you can choose how you want to sync the fields—when going into or out of Shopify.
Shopify metafields page. Image courtesy of Microsoft.
The second feature relates to troubleshooting integration issues, which will soon be more straightforward with the addition of the Shopify Skipped Records page that will show the records that Shopify rejected and provide a reason, as well as a time and date for that rejection. Some of the cases that will be logged include when a customer has an empty email, there is an invalid quantity in a posted sales invoice, and no related Shopify order exists, to name a few.
Error logging will be enabled automatically but can be adjusted to your logging needs or retention policies. Learn more.
Skipped records log. Image courtesy of Microsoft.
As we mentioned at the start of this blog, we’ve selected a handful of features we believe will have the most impact on the largest quantity of Business Central users. This is not a comprehensive list, although we encourage you to review the full release wave plans or use the Release Wave Planning tool—the latter of which we recommend as an easy way to search, review, save, and track the plans you’re most interested in!
Remember to complete thorough testing in advance of the update taking effect (which will soon be far easier due to the first update we discussed in this blog). If you don’t have time or resources for adequate testing, want a consultant to walk you through the process, or you just want that task off your to-do list, our expert Business Central consultants are here to help. Just reach out to us to get the process started.