Dynamics 365 Business Central Features in Action
If your organization is planning a move from Dynamics GP to Business Central, you probably already know that the transition is about more than just switching ERP systems.
The real opportunity in moving to the cloud is modernizing how your organization works from front to back. Business Central brings together core financial, sales, purchasing, inventory, project management, and operational functionality in a modern cloud platform designed to make information easier to access and processes easier to manage.
As for what that looks like for GP users, that’s a different story. In this guide, we’ll talk through the core features and capabilities in Business Central, including:
- Licensing options
- Core functionalities in inventory, reporting, personalization, and more
- Significant integrations with Microsoft 365, the Power Platform, and more
- AI and Copilot
- And more
In this guide, you will learn about what you can expect from Business Central and where the platform can help you work differently after go-live.
Copilot in Business Central
Copilot is in Business Central and woven throughout many important processes and workflows. While your use of AI in Business Central will depend on your business, the core Copilot capabilities are there. Let’s look at a few:
Copilot at the Role Center Level: Efficiency with Natural Language
While this is a relatively basic level of using AI, it can be quite effective. It essentially acts as your sidekick, and you can ask it to retrieve data or ask about different processes. For example, you can ask: “How do I send a customer statement?”
Copilot will then give you the results and step-by-step instructions. It goes beyond being helpful to telling you specifically how to do a process. This is extremely helpful for a team member who might be covering for another who is out sick or on holidays.
You can also ask it questions about data within your system, like: “Which customers have an outstanding balance?” Copilot will look at your data and give you an answer.
This is a big shift in terms of using natural language to streamline and automate what used to be time-consuming processes. Before Copilot, you would have had to go to a different screen to find documentation on how to send a customer statement or even look it up online. Similarly, you’d have to go into your system, switch views, and manually find each customer that has an outstanding balance. But with Copilot, you can answer both of those questions within seconds.
Copilot Agents in Business Central
There are a couple of key AI-powered Copilot Agents currently available in Business Central:
- Payable Agent: This agent is essentially doing OCR work behind the scenes. It can take an incoming document from a vendor and create a purchase invoice. You can also use it to match purchase invoices to purchase orders.
- Sales Order Agent: Allows you to interact with customers by automating document creation (for example, a sales quote) and automating email responses to customers.
- Expense Agent: Helps automate expense management by capturing receipt information, creating expense entries, and preparing expense reports for employee review and approval.
The great thing about these agents is that they essentially act as “hands on the keyboard” in that they nearly completely automate processes for you. Human oversight is still important, but these agents allow you to work a lot faster.
Licensing and Out-of-the-Box Features
Business Central’s Essentials license provides the foundation for many organizations moving from GP.
Financials
It includes comprehensive general ledger (G/L) functionality, dimensions, fixed assets, multicurrency, intercompany processing, consolidations, budgets, financial reporting, cash flow forecasting, purchasing, sales, banking, and more.
If your organization has multiple companies, Business Central has a particularly good set of out-of-the-box capabilities. You can process intercompany transactions at the G/L level while creating related purchasing and sales transactions between entities. Consolidations support scenarios like multiple companies, partial ownership, and multicurrency.
Financial management includes:
- General ledger and dimensions
- Fixed assets
- GL budgets
- Statistical accounts
- Financial reporting
- Cash flow forecasting
- Multicurrency
- Intercompany processing
- Consolidations
One notable difference for GP users is financial reporting. Business Central includes financial reporting capabilities directly in the application, eliminating the need for Management Reporter. Despite this, the underlying concepts will feel familiar, and users shouldn’t see much disruption in their workflows, if any at all.
Cash flow forecasting is another capability included with Essentials. Business Central can use purchase documents, sales documents, payment terms, budgets, manual cash entries, and fixed asset disposals to build a cash flow forecast. This information is maintained as its own set of transactions, giving you another way to analyze your expected cash position.
Sales and Purchasing
The Essentials license also includes complete purchasing and sales cycles. Organizations can use as much or as little of those processes as makes sense for their business. Purchase quotes, blanket purchase orders, purchase orders, invoices, returns, and credit memos are available, but companies don't have to use all these document types. Ultimately, it will depend on your organization’s needs.
The same flexibility exists on the sales side, with blanket sales orders, quotes, sales orders, invoices, returns, and credit memos.
Banking
Banking functionality includes bank account integration, electronic payment processing, positive pay files, and bank reconciliation. Business Central also brings Copilot capabilities into areas such as banking.
If you are accustomed to GP, the important takeaway is that Business Central isn't asking you to bolt together a collection of separate products to handle your fundamental ERP processes. A significant amount of functionality is available directly within the core application.
Inventory, Projects, and Planning Tools
Inventory is one of the areas where Business Central offers considerable flexibility, even though you don’t have to use every feature. Still, the platform provides a broad set of tools that can accommodate relatively simple distribution environments as well as more sophisticated inventory operations.
Items can support multiple units of measure, non-quantity-bearing items, and different costing methods. Costing can even vary at the item level, allowing organizations to use approaches such as FIFO and standard costing where appropriate.
For GP customers using kits, Business Central offers assembled items, with planning capabilities built around them. Organizations can stock kits in advance using assembly orders or assemble them to order when a sales order is entered.
Planning
Planning functionality also extends to replenishment. Organizations can configure parameters such as reorder points and use the requisition worksheet for distribution scenarios. For companies that require manufacturing, the platform also provides full MRP capabilities.
Project Management
Business Central also includes project accounting with the Essentials license. Projects can contain multiple tasks and incorporate timecards, purchasing, inventory consumption, and customer billing. That means organizations can track project costs across labor, purchases, and inventory and then bill customers directly from the project when needed.
Projects aren't limited to customer-facing work, either. They can also be used for internal initiatives where an organization wants to track the costs associated with a particular project or activity.
Premium Licensing Functionality and Updates
Manufacturing
Organizations with more advanced operational requirements can move beyond Essentials with the Premium license, which adds manufacturing and service management functionality.
For manufacturers, Business Central provides:
- Bills of material
- Routings
- Work centers
- Machine centers
- Production orders
- Production planning
- Manufacturing
- MRP
This provides a substantial manufacturing foundation within the same ERP platform rather than requiring a separate manufacturing system for core production processes.
Service Management
Premium also adds service management capabilities. A common example is an organization selling equipment and then managing maintenance or service calls against that equipment. Business Central provides functionality to manage those service activities alongside the rest of the organization's ERP operations.
Another important difference for GP customers is that Business Central is a browser-based, software-as-a-service application. Users can access it through common browsers rather than relying on a locally installed desktop application. Microsoft manages the backend infrastructure, including database maintenance, backups, and resource allocation.
Biannual Wave Releases
Microsoft also provides two major updates each year. Organizations have control over when those updates are applied to their environment, allowing them to prepare and test before new functionality reaches production.
That update model represents a significant shift from the traditional on-premises ERP experience. Instead of planning major infrastructure upgrades and managing the underlying application environment yourself, Microsoft maintains the cloud platform while your organization and its implementation partner focus on preparing for and taking advantage of new capabilities.
Microsoft App Store, ISVs, and Customizations
Moving to Business Central doesn't mean giving up the specialized functionality your organization relies on today. Microsoft provides an App Store for Business Central where organizations can find extensions from independent software vendors (ISVs). These extensions can add functionality to the platform without requiring organizations to build everything themselves.
Apps can be installed into a Business Central environment, with testing performed in a sandbox before moving changes into production.
Customizations and ISVs
Custom development is also possible. Business Central uses an extension-based approach that allows partners to add custom columns, tables, reports, and other functionality.
For GP customers, this creates an important opportunity during migration: don't assume every customization in GP needs to be recreated exactly as it exists today.
Instead, your implementation team can evaluate what your organization needs, determine what Business Central already provides, identify available ISV solutions, and then develop custom functionality only where there's a genuine business requirement.
That can help organizations move toward a cleaner ERP environment rather than simply rebuilding years of accumulated customizations.
Admin System and Sandbox Environment Overviews
Business Central's cloud architecture also changes how organizations manage their ERP environment. Through the Business Central administration center, you have your production environment along with sandbox environments that can be used for testing, training, pre-deployment work, and upgrade testing.
These sandboxes are particularly valuable when you're moving from GP. They provide a place to test configurations, extensions, processes, and updates without putting production operations at risk.
Microsoft manages the underlying infrastructure, including database maintenance, backups, and resource allocation. At the same time, organizations retain control over the timing of major updates, allowing them to prepare before changes are applied to production. This puts concerns about automatic updates or new features being implemented before team members are ready to use them.
That combination of Microsoft-managed infrastructure and customer-controlled testing can simplify the ongoing administration of your ERP environment.
Role Centers and Personalization
When users first log into Business Central, they don't necessarily see the same interface. Business Central uses Role Centers to organize the application around a user's job function. An accounting user can have a different view than an inventory manager, salesperson, or shipping and receiving employee.
For example, an inventory manager's Role Center can emphasize inbound and outbound inventory transactions, warehouse activity, shortcuts, and other information relevant to inventory operations.
Role Centers aren’t security settings. They’re primarily about creating a user interface that reflects the user’s responsibilities. Business Central takes that concept even further with personalization. Users can customize pages by adding, removing, and rearranging fields and sections through a simple drag-and-drop functionality.
This can make a meaningful difference in user adoption. Rather than presenting every employee with every available field, organizations can focus the interface on the information each person needs, resulting in a less cluttered, easier to navigate experience.
Drill Downs, Analysis Views, and Approvals
One of the most noticeable differences for organizations moving from GP can be how much information is available directly within Business Central.
Users may find themselves running fewer reports simply because relevant information is already visible on the screen. Fact boxes, for example, can provide additional information about the record being viewed without requiring a separate report.
Business Central also provides extensive drill-down capabilities. Clicking a balance can take a user directly into the underlying transactions, with filters automatically applied based on the information they selected. Those filters can then be adjusted to broaden or narrow the information being reviewed.
For GP users who rely heavily on SmartList, Analysis Views provide a familiar concept in a different form. Users can filter and rearrange information, add fields, summarize data, and use pivot-style analysis directly within Business Central. Analysis views can also be saved for repeated use across different areas of the application.
Live calculated values can provide another layer of visibility. On an item list, for example, users can see quantities on hand, sales orders, purchase orders, and production orders, with those figures updating as transactions are posted.
Approvals are also built into Business Central. Workflow approvals can be configured for master records, changes to specific fields, purchasing documents, and other processes. Power Automate can extend those capabilities with additional workflows and notifications.
Together, these tools can help move users away from a report-first approach to an environment where they can explore live operational data directly inside the ERP.
Working in Excel, Outlook, and Teams
Business Central is designed to work alongside the Microsoft tools your organization already uses.
Excel
Edit in Excel provides a two-way connection between Excel and Business Central. Users can work with Business Central data in Excel, update or create records, and publish changes back to the ERP.
This can be particularly useful for bulk data maintenance. Instead of entering hundreds of new inventory items individually, users can prepare information in Excel and publish it into Business Central.
Importantly, the Excel connection respects Business Central security and validates data against the system's configuration. That means users aren't simply bypassing ERP controls by working in Excel.
Outlook
Business Central also integrates with Outlook. Users can work with Business Central information from Outlook and email documents such as purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, and remittance advice.
Emails can be configured with customized message content, attachments, and supporting documents. Organizations can also automate email delivery rather than manually sending documents one at a time.
The transcript provides a practical example of an organization that automated its sales invoice emails and saved more than two hours every week.
Teams
And then there's Microsoft Teams. Business Central can be accessed directly through Teams channels, while Power Automate can send alerts into Teams when specific conditions occur in Business Central.
For example, an inspection order could trigger an automated Teams notification containing links directly back to the relevant Business Central records.
This is where the broader Microsoft ecosystem becomes especially valuable. Business Central isn't operating in isolation—it can become part of the same connected environment where employees already communicate, collaborate, analyze information, and automate processes.
Ready to Move Beyond GP?
Stoneridge Software is the partner you want in your corner. Our experts can help you:
- Prepare and plan to migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central
- Help you get the most out of Business Central once you’re there
- Configure Business Central to meet your organizational needs
- Support, optimize, and upgrade your Business Central environment so it continues to run smoothly as your company evolves
- Navigate upgrades and new features and functionalities
Talk to our experts today to navigate your Dynamics GP-to-cloud migration with confidence!
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