Each year, Microsoft conducts bi-annual updates of their entire business application platform as a ‘Release Wave’. From April to September, users of Business Central can enjoy the new updates that come as part of Release Wave 1 2023. Through this blog post we will be exploring what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
At a glance
Power Platform: Approval workflows are easier to set up in Business Central so that people can be more productive by automating more of their processes.
Application: For financials, Microsoft have invested in intercompany capabilities, enabling the possibility for general ledger settlement. All countries will be able to export SAF-T audit files. The supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimisations and enhancements that let you run your inventory and warehouse processes more efficiently.
Country and regional: More countries and regions are added to bring Business Central to more than 100 countries and regions.
Development: Business Central has moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, with continued investment in areas that enhance productivity for developers. Developers are also getting better complier resource management and code analyser performance. Additionally, permission systems are being modernised to make it easier for developers to define and maintain permissions that are easy to understand.
Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of additional self-service features to help administrators manage their environments.
Legislation: This release enables support for non-deductible VAT in the W1 version, which will upgrade to country versions in upcoming minor releases.
Onboarding: Organisations can get to productive use of the application faster, thanks to improved in-app guidance and user assistance.
Microsoft 365: We’re improving the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams
Reporting and data analysis: We’re adding a new mode on list pages to enable users to analyse and pivot data directly in the client.
Service and platform: Microsoft continue their investment in the fundamentals of their service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.
Full list of Release Wave 1 updates
Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform
Use business events to notify and trigger external systems
Business events provide partners and customers a mechanism for notifying and triggering their external systems from the Business Central application, so their systems can react and perform actions in response.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: –
Get started with more sample Power Automate templates and Power Apps
Several new sample apps that demonstrate how to access data in Business Central and how to fulfil business scenarios using Power Apps have been added, providing an easy way to get started with integrating the Power Platform and Business Central.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: May 2023
General availability: –
Support dynamic environment and company in Power Platform connector
Creators can build Power Apps and Power Automate flows that are more portable between environments or companies. This allows you to build apps and flows that can be packaged in a solution and delivered to customers through Microsoft AppSource marketplace.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: June 2023
General availability: –
Use Power Automate to post adaptive card or link to Business Central record
Two new actions in the Business Central connector for Power Automate have been added, Get URL & Get Adaptive Card.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
New approval workflow experience with Power Automate templates
Several actions linked to workflow approvals and Power Automate have been improved with additional support for selecting one of many templates for each document type. Users and decisions makers can use Power Automate to run approval and take advantage of the rich experience:
- Define workflows tied to a selected Business Central environment and company.
- Approve documents using mobile devices.
- Approve documents using Microsoft Teams.
- Support a chain of approvers and additional input.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: May 2023
Application
Adjust exchange rates easily, replace the built-in batch job
With exchange rates often changing, businesses must periodically update the rates in Business Central. This update gives accountants additional control over how they adjust exchange rates. At the same time, partners can now extend and customise the exchange rate adjustment to meet the needs of specific industries or markets.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public preview: –
General availability: April 2023
Use different general ledger accounts for payables, receivables
Sometimes businesses want to post payable and receivable transactions to a different general ledger (G/L) account than the one that is specified on the customer or vendor posting group. You can enable alterations of default customer or vendor posting groups by choosing Allow Alteration of Posting Group on the Sales and Receivable Setup and Service Mgt.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public preview: –
General availability: April 2023
Add more columns to pages for better insight
Different businesses and users need different information to complete business processes. Personalisation is a powerful tool that lets people tailor the information that pages contain by dragging fields or columns from a list to the page. Based on feedback from our community, we’ve added more fields and columns to choose from on several pages.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Avoid document number errors when you post item journals
To avoid or fix errors related to the order of document numbers when you post item journals, you can use the Renumber Document Numbers action before you post.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Catalogue items use standard number series, can include in blanket sales orders
It’s now easier for businesses to manage catalogue items. In addition to adding catalogue items to sales orders and quotes, you can assign them to blanket sales orders.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Define content of created warehouse documents with filters
You can provide more information for your warehouse team by defining filters on fields on source document lines when you create inventory put-away, pick, and movement documents. The additional information lets you be more specific about the actions to take in the warehouse.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Demo tool and data for warehouse and inventory scenarios
To help partners demonstrate the advanced capabilities of Business Central, the demo tool provides setup and data for warehouse and inventory scenarios.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Easier to create opening balances for item tracked inventory
Businesses can easily move the inventory they track with serial and batch numbers into Business Central.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Intercompany posting provides a one-stop-shop setup experience
Intercompany posting lets you manage accounting activities for a group of companies. Setting up the workflows and relationships between the companies can be complicated, so to make it easier to get started we’ve consolidated the various steps into a single page.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Post multiple transfer orders at the same time
Instead of posting individual transfer orders one by one, you can select multiple non-posted documents in a list to post them immediately or in a batch according to a schedule, such as at the end of the day.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Preview item journals and 20 other journals and documents before posting
The Preview Posting action helps you avoid mistakes by giving you the chance to review the types of entries that will be created when you post item journals or other inventory documents before you commit the changes to your database.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Review general ledger accounts faster
To speed up the period-end process of reviewing and reconciling G/L accounts, you can review the G/L entries for a given G/L account and mark the entries as Reviewed. The G/L Review action makes the review process faster and easier.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Set default dimension on locations, inventory documents, and journals
Dimensions are values that categorise entries so you can track and analyse them using various reporting tools. Having default dimensions on entities helps people avoid making mistakes and having to enter dimensions manually on the transaction level if all goods come from a single location and department.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Set up and sync master data across companies
Business Central makes it easy to move one company’s setup to another company in the same environment. You can also synchronise master data between the companies.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Ship and receive non-inventory items on warehouse documents
Warehouse employees can ship and receive non-inventory items, such as insurance or cost, on sales or purchase orders along with the physical goods on the orders.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Shopify connector becomes extensible
Tailor Shopify Connector to address the specific needs of your business.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Sometimes people post incorrect quantities on transfer orders. For example, you may have made a transfer order with the incorrect number of items and then posted it as shipped, but not received. This feature lets you undo the quantity posting, make the necessary corrections, and then post the correct quantity.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Usability improves for transfer order: select multiple items, mandatory fields
Productivity increases when processes run smoothly, so we’ve improved the usability of transfer orders. For example, you can save a step by adding multiple items to the document.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Usability improves for warehouse, inventory, and tracking areas
Productivity increases when processes are easy, so we’ve improved the usability of several areas within inventory and warehouse management. For example, you can save a step by automatically releasing source documents, and in several places, data is easier to access and digest.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Use advanced warehouse functionality with minimal complexity
You can use several features that were previously available only for locations that use directed put-away and pick, which added advanced processes, without adding unneeded complexity.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Use statistical accounts to collect data for financial reports
Businesses can significantly improve their analyses on G/L data by using additional statistical metrics. You can define statistical values and register them in a separate ledger so that you can analyse the data.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Synchronise returns, refunds from Shopify
In an integration between Shopify and Business Central, it’s important to be able to synchronise as much business data as possible. That makes it easier to keep your financials and inventory levels up to date in Business Central. We’ve expanded the data you can synchronise to include returns and refunds that were recorded in Shopify Admin or Shopify POS.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: May 2023
Country and regional
Save time with automatic account codes
People who work with documents can save time by using automatic account codes to allocate recurring transactions in a faster way.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: May 2023
Swedish localisation delivered as extension
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: May 2023
Country/regional expansion:
Andorra – Armenia – Azerbaijan – Bahamas – Bermuda – Bolivia – British Virgin Islands – Cambodia –Cameroon – Cayman Islands – Ethiopia – Fiji – Ghana – Guernsey – Isle of Man – Jersey – Kazakhstan – Kosovo – Liechtenstein – Macau (SAR China) – Madagascar – Malawi – Mozambique – Namibia – Nepal – San Marino – Sao Tome & Principe – Senegal – Tanzania – Uganda – Zambia
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: May 2023
General availability: June 2023
Supporting more countries and regions
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: May 2023
General availability: June 2023
Development
AL Explorer and AL Home in Visual Studio Code AL extension
With the introduction of the AL Explorer, we are bringing a powerful tool to the hands of pro developers and technical consultants, allowing both roles to explore, navigate, and better understand objects in extensions, including object details, dependencies, and extension points, without looking at the code. The new AL Home startup page introduces a new communication channel, allowing Business Central R&D to efficiently share news, best practices, upcoming events, urgent information and status, learning content, and more to all users of the AL Visual Studio Code extension.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: February 2023
General availability: April 2023
Improved complier resource handling and faster code analysers
Boost productivity of Business Central developers by improving performance of compilation, code analysing, and individual code analyser rules.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Provide Title and custom actions to Error dialogs
To help users get unblocked from issues when working with Business Central, we’ve introduced the capability to allow developers to unblock users when they encounter issues right away by choosing a corrective action. Making error messages more user-friendly helps build trust in Business Central while at the same time saving time in correcting common issues.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Control database locking behaviour
Database locking is one of the main root causes for performance issues. When AL code takes fewer locks, it increases the performance of the system for users.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
Define regional settings per report using a region property
In this release, we’ve added the ability for developers and tenant administrators to set formats for dates and numerical types on report objects on the tenant. If needed, users can change the format when they run a report.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
AL-Go for GitHub – modern DevOps for partners
With AL-Go for GitHub, DevOps becomes a tool instead of an investment area. The target for AL-Go for GitHub is to have 100 percent of the functionality needed by 90 percent of our partners. These partners should be able to use AL-Go for GitHub as their DevOps solution without the need to hire a DevOps engineer.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Extensions that fail pre-upgrade validation get more detailed error insights
When Business Central prepares a tenant upgrade, all extension versions that will be installed as part of the upgrade go through a pre-validation. To ensure a better understanding of failures as part of the pre-validation process, errors messages will contain more information about incompatible extensions.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
Attach AL debugger to active session or next session
The legacy C/AL debugger supported attaching to an existing session or to the next session for a specific user. While this has been possible with the AL snapshot debugger for some time, the standard, more powerful AL debugger in Visual Studio Code is still missing this capability, and it’s been a partner ask to fill this gap for a while. With the introduction of service-to-service (S2S) authentication, this has become more important, since it’s now much harder to debug important web service scenarios, which are only possible with snapshot debugger.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: May 2023
General availability: May 2023
ISVs can organise a preview for their AppSource apps
AppSource ISVs will be able to test and collect early feedback on the new versions of their apps by organising a private preview with a select group of their customers.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: July 2023
General availability: July 2023
Governance and administration
Delegated admin’s job queue entries are run by user
Microsoft partners use the delegated admin role to set up and manage certain aspects of Business Central on behalf of their customers. However, the role is restricted in some ways. In earlier release waves, one of these restrictions was the ability to create job queue entries and set them as ready to run for customers. With this update, delegated admins can create job queue entries and request approval from a licensed user to run them.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Get an improved cloud migration status overview
The cloud migration status details in the application help you stay informed on the execution of your data migration. In this wave, we make errors more discoverable, warnings more helpful, and it’s easier to get an overview of what data was moved, overwritten, or missed.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Manage user permissions using security groups
You can now use Azure Active Directory security groups to manage the permissions users have to access various parts of Business Central.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March
General availability: April 2023
Experience improved app management settings
With this release wave, it’ll be easier to make sure that apps that are installed in an environment are always updated to the latest version.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: June 2023
Include or exclude tables from cloud migration
Some customers have specific needs to explicitly include or exclude certain tables when migrating their data to the cloud. We now make it possible to specify whether any table—as long as it’s accessible by AL code and not marked as internal or on-premises only—is included or excluded as part of the cloud migration.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: June 2023
Transfer environments between Azure AD tenants
In 2023 release wave 1, the process for transferring a Business Central environment to a different Azure AD tenant will be a self-service scenario. Internal administrators can request an environment transfer from the source tenant, then accept the transfer from the target tenant.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: June 2023
Legislation
Audit file export eases SAF-T compliance
Many countries/regions require reporting financial data and providing a set of SAF-T exports. The new Audit file export extension makes it easy to set up, generate, and export SAF-T in Business Central.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: May 2023
Non-deductible, partly deductible VAT expands functionality
Users in all relevant regions have improved VAT functionality with non-deductible and partly deductible VAT enabled. Business Central lets businesses calculate deductible and non-deductible VAT amounts. You can configure VAT so that it isn’t deducted for purchases under certain conditions.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: May 2023
Productive with Microsoft 365
Experience enhanced adaptive cards in Teams
Sharing Business Central records as cards in Microsoft Teams adds context to every conversation and helps people make data-driven decisions. Business Central offers multiple ways to share a record as a card, such as the Share to Teams feature in the web client, pasting a deep link to any page or record in Teams chat, or searching for business contacts directly from within Teams. This update includes multiple enhancements that make adding a card easier than ever.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: April 2023
Configure security controls for Teams cards
When users collaborate on business data by sharing Business Central records as cards in Microsoft Teams, the record is summarised as a set of fields that others can read to quickly gain context. Administrators in organisations that need elevated security can now configure security for all cards originating from Business Central.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: –
Easily set up access with Microsoft 365 licenses
Building upon capabilities made generally available in November 2022, Business Central now makes it easier than ever for administrators to set up access with Microsoft 365 licenses, so that they can choose which employees can view specific business data shared with them in Microsoft Teams, without requiring a Business Central license.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: –
General availability: April 2023
Reporting and data analysis
Analyse, group, and pivot data on list pages using multiple tabs
End users and data analysts can analyse data from list pages directly in the client without the need to open the page in Excel or run a report.
The ability to analyse data directly in list pages raises the bar for what you can do without having to switch applications, while still allowing customers and partners to do more in report objects, Excel, Power BI, or other data analysis applications.
Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: TBA
Service and platform
Allow application and tenant databases to differ in collation
The collation of a database controls the ordering and equality operations of strings. In earlier versions of Business Central, a multitenant installation required the application database and the tenant databases to have the same database collation. In this release, the Business Central server (the NST) will work even though the application and tenant databases use a different database collation.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
Business Central server runs on .NET 6
The Business Central server now runs on Microsoft .NET 6, rather than .NET Framework 4.8. This improves performance and resource consumption on all AL code execution.
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
Telemetry events on incoming and outgoing calls to web services, long-running AL methods, and error dialogs have been enhanced to make it even easier to troubleshoot performance and stability issues.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Performance – OData calls are now faster
Most integrations to Business Central from external systems and services use the OData technology to read and write data. We’ve optimised this part of the Business Central server so that OData calls run faster and consume less resources. For customer integrations that use OData, this means better throughput (more calls per minute).
Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: April 2023
User Experiences
Copy and paste readable hyperlinks
Business Central now uses a simple and clear schema for link and window captions that is automatically updated as you navigate within the web client. As a result, copying a link to any Business Central page or record and pasting that in a rich-text editor, such as an Outlook email, Microsoft Teams chat, or your project OneNote, will display a more meaningful hyperlink that is consistent no matter how or where you copy the link.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: April 2023
General availability: –
Add existing table fields to optimise your pages
In this wave, we’re unlocking all table fields so that users can add them to their pages to personalise their workspace, without having to resort to extensions.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: June 2023
General availability: –
Drag and drop files onto the file upload dialog
When your file is already at hand, you can save time by dragging that file onto the file upload dialog in Business Central, instead of the more cumbersome navigating through folders in a file picker window. Drag-and-drop experiences are essential to working efficiently.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: January 2023
General availability: April 2023
Access actions and navigation menu efficiently with keyboard
Business Central adopts the familiar experience from Microsoft 365 applications, such as Excel and Word, to boost efficiency for keyboard users. Access keys with key tips help users quickly explore, navigate, and activate any action in the action bar, navigation menus, and other user interface (UI) elements.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: February 2023
General availability: April 2023
Get more productivity out of an optimised Action Bar on all app pages
A promoted section of the Action Bar can help you learn how to use the product. You can tailor it to fit the needs of your industry, company, or yourself. Add actions that you want to make available in an easily discoverable and consistent way across the product to help new users get started quickly, or tailor it to your business-specific needs for proficient users.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Tailor the action bar to fit your needs on document lines
We’ve added flexibility to the ways you can personalise menus to suit your preferences. In addition to the action bar at the top of pages, you can also personalise actions on subparts in the content area.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: March 2023
General availability: April 2023
Improved alignment of headers in statistics pages
The default behaviour across Business Central is to right align numeric fields and left align text fields. However, when pages display fields arranged in special tabular layouts, such as customer statistics or on most journal footers, the mixed data types often result in column headers being misaligned with their data. With this update, users benefit from improved readability of data with automatically aligned headers.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: February 2023
General availability: April 2023
Get unblocked using actionable error messages in select application areas
To help you resolve issues when working with Business Central, we’ve added actions to error messages. Making error messages more user friendly helps build trust in Business Central and saves time by making it easier to correct issues.
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public preview: May 2023
General availability: June 2023
This list contains all the upcoming updates and changes for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central over the coming months. As you can see, there is plenty to look forward to! If you would like to learn more about any of the changes or looking to implement Business Central for your business, simply leave your details in the contact form below.
Users of legacy versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV can also take advantage of our Fixed Price Upgrade offer when upgrading to Business Central.
