Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central provides solutions for a wide variety of business needs. It is designed particularly with small and midsized businesses in mind to help them manage and adapt their processes.

Business Central is receiving a variety of updates as part of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 release wave 2 plan for its wide range of business.

There are improvements for general app performance, administration tools, handling of growing consumer bases, file storage, business expansion, and an increased integration with Microsoft Teams. Also, included in these updates are many user-requested features.

Administration

There are many administration tools and features being updated in this release. Most are aimed towards partner administrators, but a few will pique the interest of day-to-day users. As an example, there will now be support for an unlimited number of production and sandbox environments. With this update, users with a Business Central Premium or Essential subscription plan will start out with one production environment and three sandbox environments. New production environments can be purchased, and each new production environment will come with three sandbox environments. These sandboxes give users a safe test ground to try out different features and setups without needing to worry about affecting their live data.

Microsoft also plans to implement an environment backup system. Using Azure SQL Database, automatic backups will be stored and can be used to recover and environment if some sort of otherwise irreversible damage were to occur to the data. These backups will go back up to 30 days. This environment backup feature is currently planned for general availability in February 2021. The full details of the administration features updates can be found here.

Application

The functionality of Business Central itself has received many tweaks and new features as well.  Most feature are generally available as of October 1st, but there are a number of features releasing in the coming months. For users with access to multiple company environments, there is now a Company Hub page to provide a hub with easy access to different environments and functions. Users are also able to set different home pages if there is a particular page needed more often. Users of Accountant Hub will want to migrate to Company Hub as Accountant Hub has been deprecated as of Company Hub’s release on October 1st.

The Role Center has been updated to be easier to navigate and clearer to read. Roles that had a page consisting solely of the navigation menu have been filtered out of the selection. If users want to bring those roles back into the selection screen, simply remove navigation menu only from the role description. The remaining roles have had their views updated to fit more inline with the description of the role. Specifics for each role’s updates can be found here. To learn more about how roles work, check out our blog post about them here.

Contacts have also received a touchup to make their details more consistent across the platform. The way phone numbers and email addresses display will be the same and can be used on data entry pages, report data sets, report layouts, and segment lines that include contact details. Contacts may now be converted into employee or vendor contacts using included templates.

There are also a number of quality of life features for day-to-day Business Central users that are being added to make the system easier to use:

Item references can be longer fit descriptions

Able to enable journal copying to posted general journals

Can copy posted journal lines to specific batches

Sales Shipments and Return Orders are now customizable via Word

Administrators can define custom data retention policies

Clean outdated table and log data based on expiration dates and other criteria

With an increasing number of companies using VAT groups, Business Central has added support for VAT groups and easier reporting. Many subsidiary companies run Business Central while their parent companies use Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. In the past there had ben some issues converting consolidations, but Business Central now has a consolidation file format specifically designed for Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. Sales invoices, sales credit memos, and return receipts will now also have the package tracking feature.

A few features that use Common Data Service are being better optimized. Some common data service conflicts will now be able to automatically resolve. On the Integration Table Mapping page, the Resolve Deletion Conflicts can recover deleted records and uncouple records. Resolve Update Conflicts can send or receive an update to the data in the integration table. If there is an issue in the integration with Common Data Service, records can now be uncoupled in bulk, rather than requiring individual attention. Integration table mappings can now be easily reset to Common Data Service defaults either individually or all together.

Some features are still yet to be released for general availability:

Define high-risk data fields and notify users when attempting to edit them

Planned for November 2020

Utilize Recurring Journals to allocate balances be specified dimensions

Filters sourced from G/L account

Can be set recurring method to balance or reverse balance

Planned for November 2020

Improved emails to support multiple accounts, distribution groups, and an improved attachment manager

Supports workflows and previews as well

Planned or November 2020

Bank reconciliations can be canceled to correct mistakes

Payment reconciliation journal supports application against employee ledger entries, on-to-many matching, preview posting, separate number series, user-defined document numbers

Coming February 2021

Integration improvements

Coming to general availability in December this year is Business Central’s integration with Microsoft Teams. Users will be able to install the BC app in Teams allowing them to work with BC records directly from the Teams interface. Users can also link to a record in a Teams chat to make a compact card of the record. Team members can click into the card to view full details with all embedded content and FactBoxes. Users can even take actions, make edits to content, and initiate workflows all from within Teams.

Working with the Microsoft Power Platform is getting easier too. Entities from Business Central are put into Common Data service as virtual entities. By doing this, Power Platform will be able to leverage these entities as if they were physical entities. This enables more solutions to be created through Common Data Service and Power Platform. Similarly, data syncing between Business Central and Common Data Service has been improved to reduce potential conflicts.

User interface optimizations

The visuals of Business Central have been updated to resemble other Dynamics 365 apps more closely. Other changes include:

Task Dialogs

Will now be displayed in the middle of the screen

Actions are presented below the page caption

There will be consistent methods to close or undo lookups

Viewing the FactBox pane will be more consistent

Maximizing the view of a dialog box will be consistent both vertically and horizontally

Embedded Lists

Parts inside groups will stretch to fill space

Parts and repeaters inside NavigatePage and StandardDialog will fill the dialog

Wasted space caused by list parts split by nested groups reduced

Card pages with a group then followed by a list part will now fill the space

Some fonts and sizing were adjusted along with the Bahnschrift font being removed

The action bar within lookup dialogs has been collapsed to a more simplified category view

User can opt to view the fully expanded bar if preferred

Microsoft has made improvements to accessibility for lower-vison users. Page content can be zoomed up to 400 percent or reduced to a browser width of 320 pixels without losing functionality of information. Many windows and functions are more responsive when at these higher zooms or smaller windows. Filter and FactBox panes remain accessible as well. The color contrast has been tuned to be easier to view.

Additional quality of life features include:

Clearer navigation terminology

Faster load times on Role Centers

Regional support for:

Brazil

Ireland

Lithuania

India - Currently in public preview with general availability to be announced

In November, the mobile app will be getting easier access to production and sandbox environments and support for multifactor authentication.

Pages with FactBoxes will load faster by prioritizing the main content of the page over the FactBoxes. If the FactBox pane is closed, FactBoxes will not automatically load upon entering the page. They can be brought up on-demand by opening the FactBox pane. Also, when generating reports, users are now able to view multiple previews with different parameters without needing to close to window. After finding the desire parameters, the user can print or export the report.

Get started

Microsoft is making a wide array of improvements to Dynamics 365 Business Central, both small and large. Many of these changes come from users-submitted requests. With these new updates, it is a great time to consider what Business Central can do for your organization.