Category: Business Central (Nav/Navision)

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 7th of the new functionality in the Copilot and AI section is automate payables processes with the Payables Agent.

The Payables Agent in Business Central assists you by automating tedious and time-consuming accounts payables (AP) and accountant tasks, saving time and reducing errors. The agent sources vendor invoice attachments from email and SharePoint, and creates purchase invoice documents in Business Central for review. The agent uses available purchase history or the company’s accounting policies to register purchase invoices. The Payables Agent allows AP professionals, clerks, and accountants to focus on more demanding tasks, boosting productivity and efficiency.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2025
General Availability: –

Feature Details

Every company has expenses. Some relate to the supply chain, and others to operating costs like rent, utilities, leasing, food, phone bills, and software subscriptions. These operating costs, known as overhead expenses, are the first focus of the Payables Agent. They are often received as email attachments or through other channels.

Sourcing files and attachments related to purchase of overhead expenses
In the first version, the Payables Agent can source purchase attachments (PDF files) from a Microsoft 365 email account where vendors send their invoices. The agent can also import PDF files from a shared SharePoint folder where the accountant and other employees place files to be processed. These invoice documents are imported into E-Documents in Business Central for further processing. After importing the documents, the agent moves the files to an archive folder.

Processing imported purchase attachment and files
Once files are imported, Azure Document Intelligence processes them using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The results are stored in Business Central in the E-Document. An updated PDF attachment viewer lets users validate the OCR processing by viewing the attachment in near-full screen with position overlays of captured information like amounts and descriptions.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1: Automate Payables Processes with the Payables Agent”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 6th of the new functionality in the Copilot and AI section is autofill fields with Copilot.

Entering data can be time-consuming and error-prone, both for casual users of Business Central, as well as expert users who are tasked with entering record after record throughout their workday. Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered assistant for work that helps spark creativity, boost productivity, and eliminate tedious tasks. Copilot now suggests appropriate field values so that you can simply choose to keep them instead of typing.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: –

Feature Details

Autofill is a new capability of Copilot in Business Central:

• When drafting a new record or editing an existing record, Copilot can suggest values for some of the editable fields on the page.
• Autofill is available for fields (but not rows or columns) in card and document pages such as Customers, Sales Orders, Items, or even your own custom pages.
• Suggestions are grounded in your company data, and might be based on recently used values, frequently used values, or intelligent selection from a choice of values in a lookup or option field. They can also be AI-generated depending on the field and context.
• Copilot simply suggests the value to you, giving you the opportunity to review where the suggestion originates from. Ultimately, users remain in control and decide to apply that value, discard it, or replace it.
• Available later this wave: Copilot will automatically search the web for more information and provide suggestions for customer or vendor contact details, product codes, and similar fields that typically contain public information.

My Opinion

Like a lot of the Copilot functions I really want to see this in action, before I give an opinion.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 5th of the new functionality in the Application section is use improved troubleshooting options for cost adjustments.

The improvements to cost adjustment in Business Central enhance processing speed, provide greater control over adjustments, introduce proactive issue notifications, offer visibility into adjustment progress, and ensure partial progress is saved to prevent full reruns on failure—leading to more accurate inventory valuation, reduced financial discrepancies, improved decision-making, and increased operational efficiency.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview:  Mar 14, 2025
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

Inventory cost adjustment in Business Central is the process of ensuring that item costs are accurately reflected by adjusting costs based on changes in purchase prices, revaluations, or applied costs through transactions such as sales, consumption, and transfers.

It’s essential for maintaining correct inventory valuation and COGS, especially when businesses use costing methods such as FIFO, LIFO, or Average. You can run cost adjustment automatically or manually, and it affects historical transactions and financial reports. To avoid discrepancies, it’s important to set up cost adjustments correctly and regularly monitor them.

Microsoft are introducing multiple enhancements to the cost adjustment process to improve its performance for larger workloads and allow easier troubleshooting and monitoring:

• Identified and eliminated bottlenecks based on telemetry data and code analysis, which significantly improves processing speed.
• Introduced period-by-period and selected production and assembly order adjustments for high-transaction items, which lets you control processing scope.
• Added notifications for potential issues, suboptimal settings, high volumes of entries, and data discrepancies.
• Developed a tool to visualize adjustment progress, which helps you analyze performance issues and identify inefficiencies.
• Enabled item-by-item adjustments, which ensures that partial progress is saved in long-running processes to prevent full reruns if things go wrong.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1: Use Improved Troubleshooting Options for Cost Adjustments”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 2nd of the new functionality in the User experiences section is optimize screen estate usage on the web.

Work optimally with the Business Central web client on modern devices with large screen sizes or large external monitors. This feature ensures optimal screen usage even when pages are shown in different modes, maximizing your productivity and efficiency in the web client.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

This feature optimizes screen estate usage in the Business Central web client. It includes:

• Optimized default narrow mode page sizes.
• Optimized sizing and animation of the FactBox pane in narrow mode.
• An option to resize the FactBox pane and remember this choice per page and mode.

My Opinion

This sounds like some good usability improvements when viewing Business Central on smaller screens. I would like to see some improvements for larger screens; where the client doesn’t expand to fill the whole page when the browser is expanded; many websites handle this by defining a maximum width and keeping the display to that as a maximum.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 1st of the new functionality in the User experiences section is preview PDF attachments directly in web client.

By providing you a smooth and easy way to work with attachments, report outputs, or incoming documents, you remain productive and in the context of your work, which saves time and effort.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

This feature lets you open PDF attachments directly in the Business Central web client without downloading them first. Files are shown in preview mode in a specialized viewer experience, similar to the print preview feature, and you can always download a PDF file from there.

This feature works automatically across all areas of Business Central, including ISV code. However, it requires an uptake from extension developers because two new AL methods have been added to capture this new behavior, following the pattern of the File.Download method:

• File.ViewFromStream – for Business Central online
• File.View – for Business Central on-premises

This feature is now used in various areas of Business Central, such as document attachments and incoming documents.

My Opinion

I can see the benefit of this one both in ease of viewing and that PDFs aren’t downloaded onto whichever machine you’re working on when you viewed the file.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 10th of the new functionality in the Sustainability management section is use sustainability Scope 3 value chain in manufacturing.

Sustainability Scope 3 value chain process automation involves standard ERP processes to streamline the collection, calculation, and reporting of indirect emissions data across a company’s upstream and downstream value chain, improving accuracy, efficiency, and compliance with sustainability goals. Scope 3 is significant for accurate tracking because it represents a majority of emissions, influences business decisions, and aligns with many regulations.

Scope 3 is also probably the most complex for measuring because it requires data from multiple sources. For example, from vendors, but also internal operations such as transfers, manufacturing, and so on. This feature provides more control by enabling you to track emissions in the manufacturing process and automatically calculate newly added emission in both downstream and upstream activities related to their inventory.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: Oct 2025

Feature Details

This feature allows you to calculate CO2e for finished goods by using raw material emissions data from purchase documents and adding emissions from manufacturing processes.

To facilitate this, the new CO2e per Unit and Total CO2e fields are available on the following pages

• Production BOM
• Routing
• Components
• Operations
• Production Order Lines
• Consumption
• Output Journals

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1: Use Sustainability Scope 3 Value Chain In Manufacturing”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 9th of the new functionality in the Sustainability management section is start value chain in purchase process for Scope 3 in sustainability.

Sustainability Scope 3 value chain process automation involves standard ERP processes to streamline the collection, calculation, and reporting of indirect emissions data across a company’s upstream and downstream value chain. The processes improve accuracy, efficiency, and compliance with sustainability goals. This feature provides flexibility by enabling you to track emissions starting with the purchase process, and to start the final emission calculation.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2025
General Availability: Oct 2025

Feature Details

Scope 3 is significant for accurate tracking because it represents the majority of emissions, influences business decisions, and aligns with many regulations. Scope 3 is also probably the most complex for measuring because it requires data from multiple sources. For example, from vendors, but also internal operations such as transfers, manufacturing, and so on.

When you post emission values with purchase invoices, Business Central creates a sustainability ledger entry, as usual. It also creates and a new sustainability value entry that references the item ledger entry with the same item ledger entry type, and records details related to the calculated CO2e Amount. This marks the beginning of the emission valuation process, where Business Central tracks all emission changes through other processes. This feature in purchase documents currently applies only to items. It doesn’t yet support item charges for adding additional emissions. Also, this release supports only the Average model of emission calculation.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 1.

The 8th of the new functionality in the Sustainability management section is use ESG Reporting integrated with Business Central.

Business Central users can now seamlessly integrate the Project ESG Reporting app with the Sustainability module for streamlined compliance reporting aligned with standards like CSRD, ASRS, and BRSR, with future expansions planned. This feature eliminates the need for repetitive data entry and lets you manage non-transactional data outside of Business Central. It marks another milestone in Microsoft’s commitment to fostering collaboration across business applications, enhancing efficiency and compliance for users.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Apr 2025

Feature Details

Business Central users can leverage the Sustainability module to measure environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and waste intensity while maintaining data required for compliance reporting. You can also use features such as statistical accounts to track and measure social and governance impacts.

This functionality allows you to collect sustainability data and align it with regulatory taxonomies required for reporting under various standards, such as Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR). After you collect and aggregate data in Business Central, you can seamlessly transfer it to the Project ESG Reporting app, where you can add more text or contextual information as needed. The reporting process ends with the generation of regulatory-compliant files for submission, which streamlines the entire sustainability reporting workflow.