The value of Role Centers in Business Central
You get the most out of your ERP when it’s a best-fit solution for your business needs, allowing you to reap the benefits of saving time, getting more work done, and building cleaner processes. Even long after your implementation, there are plenty of ways to keep building up Business Central as a highly customized system that empowers users to do more with the tools they’re provided. Working with Role Centers is another way to make Business Central work exactly how you need it to.
Business Central can be built from scratch and customized from a company-wide standpoint, but it can also be personalized for each and every user—this gives you the ability to tailor your own user experience to meet the day-to-day needs of your role.
Understanding the Role Center
Your Role Center is essentially your dashboard—the first thing you see when you log into Business Central. It’s where you can access all your most necessary information, like quick links to most-needed actions and interactive widgets with insights, forecasts, open tasks, reports, and more.
One of the most advantageous things you can do as a system admin is to create a role-tailored experience to help users work smarter, faster, and more efficiently. When your employees are able to work with a user-centric experience, the system feels more intuitive to work with.
Selecting Roles
When a user is given access to Business Central, they need to be assigned at least one role center (if not more). Selecting different roles will essentially reconfigure the dashboard and quick links – but nothing in terms of functionality will actually be removed from your view of the system. It’s all still there, but reorganized. But, of course, a user still needs to be given proper security rights to access what they want to within the system.
You change your role by going to the top navigation ribbon, clicking the “Settings” gear, then “My Settings” and you’ll see “Available Roles.” Custom roles can be named anything your administration decides, and there are a few pre-built roles already standard in Business Central.
Click into the Role field and from there, you can scroll through your available roles.
Common roles you can assign are Accountant, Accounting Manager, Bookkeeper, Business Manager, Sales Order Processor, Manufacturing Manager, Project Manager, Warehouse Worker, Team Member—and if these aren’t quite right for your needs, you can easily make your own.
Tip: save time by copying an existing profile and making the tweaks you need. That way, you start off with a strong base instead of starting from scratch.
What you will see on this main page of Business Central will change based on what Microsoft has deemed most helpful for the given role you’ve selected – “Accountant” or “Business Manager” or “Team Member” and so on. Hitting the Hamburger menu in the navigation ribbon (on the same ribbon as “CRONUS USA, INC” in the previous example images) will show you all the areas within Business Central, whether you have access to them or not.
Spot the differences between the Accountant Role Center (image 1) and the Business Manager Role Center (image 2);
No matter your role, some of Business Central’s many features will not be included in your Role Center, but as long as your system admin has granted you the necessary rights, you can still access it and add it to your Role Center as needed.
Company-Wide Role Center Customizations
Though there are many pre-built roles that come out-of-the-box with Business Central, those roles aren’t always perfectly matched to your unique organizational needs. So, the true power of Roles is that you can create as many custom ones as you want, and you can assign as many roles as you want to any given user.
Consider roles based on job task or job titles, and how it might help your employees to have a custom home screen of the system to get their job done better, faster, easier.
First and foremost, though, we want to emphasize that the default roles provided out-of-the-box by Microsoft should not be changed. You want to maintain those as-is; instead, you can create new profiles from scratch, or copy an existing default role and modify the copy. Editing a role copy is absolutely our go-to recommendation.
Admin can copy and edit roles for company-wide configurations, and this is how you do it:
1. Search “profiles”
2. select “Profiles (Roles)”
3. Select a role
4. Click “Copy” profile then select “Customize pages”
5. This brings you to the dashboard with a clickable interface that looks a lot like the interface when you’re making your own personal changes. Make any changes you want to the role!
6. Hit “done” and once the page refreshes, anyone who has access to this role will see the changes applied next time they go into this role
Another perk of Role centers: if a certain role will be pretty standard for a majority of your users, you can set this role as the default profile for new users. Admin can do that within the role itself, under “Additional Settings.”
Another particular bonus? Many of these won’t require any kind of code or developer involvement. For those select things a developer will be needed for (such as to change the top navigation menu, the second level navigation bar, and the action bar with links to pages, reports, and other system entities like customers, sales orders, invoices, etc.), your Microsoft Partner will be happy to assist.
User-Level Personalizations
Personalizations modify the layout and positioning of elements on your screen to help you navigate to the things you need more quickly, or gather relevant information at a glance. If they sound a lot like role customizations we talked about above, you’d be absolutely correct. The only difference: Role customizations roll out to every individual with access to that role, while personalizations stay on the individual level.
These are helpful tweaks and changes that can be made to individual user workspaces and ultimately come down to your own personal preference, allowing you to equip yourself with the features and data that you need, where you need it. Although some page elements may be locked by your system admin, you can hide, move, and adjust fields, columns, quick links, certain actions, and other widgets found on your dashboard. You can also adjust things like column width and position on the page.
Navigate to the settings gear in the top ribbon of Business Central, and from there, select “Personalize.”
You’ll be able to hide or move fields, columns, certain actions, quick links, and other widgets on your dashboard – as well as other tweaks like column width and position on the page. This should cover the vast majority of changes you’d like to make, but deeper customizations like page extensions or site-wide changes can be made by a developer.
You can also opt to move, remove, hide, show, show under “show more”, show when collapsed, show always, set/clear freeze pane, include/exclude from quick entry the fields in your Role Center.
If you change your mind, you can also clear Personalizations, with the option to clear all if needed—back to the role’s default.
Though any user can personalize the roles/profiles they have access to, this is a feature that admin can enable or disable via a simple toggle within the role itself. There’s plenty of instances in which you as an administrator would want to bar your users from modifying their personal view (and many instances in which you’d want them to be able to modify their view, too!). So, regardless your company’s choice, to enable or disable personalization, go to the role and look under “Additional Settings.”
If you’re ready for a system that works harder for you, let us know. Get in touch with our consulting team and see if Business Central is right for your business.