Author: Ian Grieve

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

There is typically three main ways that configuring a new company in Business Central is accomplished. I’m not so much talking about the creation of the first company, but if you’re configuring a multi-company system and want to ease setup of the many companies required.

The three ways, which I have used and/or seen used are:

• Configuration Packages.
• Template, which is sometimes called a Gold Build.
• Master Data Management.

With the configuration package approach, the first company is populated and configuration packages used to export and import data between one company and another. This option is maximum flexibility as you can choose which configuguration packages are used. It is also sometimes used to provide a basic configuration of the first company being created.

The template approach is where one company is configured as a template with the settings and any common master data, but no transactional data whatsoever. When a new company is needed, this company is copied to a new one and settings unique to the new company (such as the Local Currency) are configured.

Master data Management is the newest of these options, introduced in release 2023 Wave 1, it allows tables and fields to be synchronised between companies. It can be used for both the initial setup and the ongoing syncing of data (such as if a unified chart of accounts is in use). This feature, despite it’s name, allows the syncing of both setup and master data.

There is no one-size fits all approach and they all have potential downsides.

The template approach can sometimes fail if the template is not kept up-to-date; master data can fail, quite horribly, if the wrong tables and fields are synchronised (never sync the id fields for example).

I’d be interested in hearing which approach, and why, people use if anyone would like to share.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Deleting a company in Business Central is quite easy to do; this is of course a double edged sword.

If the wrong company is deleted from an environment, can it be restored? The short answer is, no, the deletion of a company is permanent.

The best that can be done is to do a point in time restore of the environment, which will get you that company back, but restores the entire environment, so you may need to repeat all of the data entry and processing done between the time the environment was restored too and the time you stopped processing.

This is another of those areas where it would be good to see some enhancements to allow the point in time restore to be done for a single company.

I figure the current process is the nature in which Business Central stores the company data; each company has a set of tables prefixed with the company name and all are stored in one database, which is the environment.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

One of my early thoughts when starting to work with Business Central was how to refresh a sandbox environment. It’s all very well to create one, but at some point you’ll want it to reflect the up-to-date production environment, so that any testing or development you do is against how the system is now being used.

This is one area where I think Business Central could do with some improvement; you cannot refresh an environment.

Instead you need to delete the current sandbox environment and create a new one with a copy of production.

This seems a little ore work than is needed and will also mean that you will need to make any necessary adjustments to user logins and permissions to make sure only the right people have access to the sandbox.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

If something catastrophic happens with your Business Central system, then it is possible to do a point in time restore of the environment; this does seem to be limited to the environment level rather than the company level.

This is a feature of how Business Central stores the data for companies; basically an environment is a database and the tables for all of the companies are in the database, prefixed with the company name.

You can do this by logging into the Business Central admin center, select the environment and click the Restore button:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Restore an Environment to a Point in Time”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you delete an environment, it is first soft deleted for a fourteen day period in which you can restore it, after which it is permanently deleted. If more than fourteen days old, you will need to open a service request with Microsoft.

To restore a soft deleted environment, access the Business Central Admin Center and click the Restore deleted environments button to see the environments which are available for restoration.

I have an IESandbox environment which can be restored; you’ll notice below, that it has a year and time appended to the name. This happens automatically when an environment is deleted, to make sure that every deleted environment has a unique name.

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Restore a Deleted Environment”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you sign up for a Business Central trial, a production environment is created for you; if you sign up in other ways, you will have to create the first environment yourself.

You can also create sandbox environments with a copy of production or the CRONUS sample company data.

Through time, you will end up with a few environments; commonly I deal with clients who have production, development and testing environments on the system. At some point you will need to delete an environment, which is fairly easy to do.

To do this, log into your Business Central admin center, which you can access by clicking the settings cog in Business Central and then Admin Center.

Once in the admin center drill into the environment you want to delete and click the Delete button:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Delete an Environment”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Deleting companies in Business Central is quite easy to do and reinforces why security in Business Central should limit users access to pages to only those pages they need. Deleting companies is done through the Companies (357) page.

Select the company, or companies, you want to delete and click the Delete button:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Delete a Company”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

I am doing some work implementing Business Central for a company which will be changing their name before too long and there was a short debate about whether the environment was to be created using their current name or the new name, in advance of the name changing. However, this isn’t actually too important a point as it is pose to rename environments in Business Central.

To do this, you need to open your Admin Panel, which you can do from within Business Central by clicking the settings cog and then Admin Panel. when the admin panel opens, drill into the environment to be renamed and click the Rename button:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Rename an Environment”