What is Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Dynamics 365 Business Central is the next generation of what was previously known as Dynamics NAV (and even before that, it was Navision!) and as such it has at its foundation a set of trusted, proven technologies that have served 160,000 customers and millions of users worldwide!

What's the difference between Dynamics NAV & Dynamics 365 Business Central?

In some ways the question at hand can be answered in a short sentence; ‘Dynamics 365 Business Central is just the new name for Dynamics NAV’.

As with all great products, names can change and brands can adapt under new ownership, but a software product is defined in its code. In Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central, it is defined in its deep rich application logic. That business logic is its DNA: what has made it survive when others failed, and why its broad and deep functionality runs thousands of companies all over the globe.

Can Dynamics 365 Business Central be customised?

Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to fit to how you, as a user, work; giving you a multitude of ways to make the solution fit like a glove! Some of the ways of customising your Dynamics 365 Business Central system include:

Personalised Role Centre with screens tailored to you
The ability to show / hide columns
'Design' and 'Personalisation' modes to make changes either for everyone who uses the system or just to yourself
Being able to manipulate lists to add or remove pretty much anything you see on the page!

What is Dynamics 365?

Dynamics 365 Business Central Features / Functionality

With Dynamics 365 Business Central you can revolutionise how you do business; taking streamlining, automation and customer engagement to a new level! It gives you a single, end-to end solution for managing finances, operations, sales and customer service, and an opportunity to easily upgrade from entry-level accounting software and legacy ERP systems.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is great value because it integrates with other Microsoft cloud services including Office 365 and can be customised or extended for specific industry needs with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. So, let’s take a look at what it can do!

Infographic to represent functionality

Financial Management – Dynamics 365 Business Central Dynamics 365 Business Central enables you to streamline your financial close and get real-time visibility into the performance of your business. You can easily share your information in a secure manner with an accountant and gain more control over your budgets and cashflow.
Reporting & Analytics – Centralise your financial management data across accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and customer interactions for an up-to-date, end-to-end view of your business. Make faster, more informed decisions when you’re guided by connected processes, predictive analytics, and real-time data.
Order Processing – Dynamics 365 Business Central enables you to monitor and control your sales-order and purchasing process through automated workflows and dynamically updated inventory levels. You can prevent unnecessary or fraudulent purchases by implementing approvals, plus modify a posted invoice in your financial management system and register the correction without hassle.
Sales & Marketing – With Dynamics 365 Business Central you can shorten the time from quote to cash by connecting your sales and accounting. Connect the dots between your sales and marketing teams and act quickly on sales-related enquiries right from Outlook. Easily handle multiple ship-to and bill-to addresses per customer, including direct shipment and invoicing addresses.
Warehouse Management – Dynamics 365 Business Central brings together comprehensive organisational information, automate manual tasks, connect processes and workflows, enable fact-based inventory management, and provide managers with clear visibility into business performance, margins, profitability, and opportunities for improvement.
Resource & Project Management – Perform common resource & project management tasks and get all the data you need to help manage budgets and monitor progress. Track machine and employee project hours using timesheets, and access real-time data on available resources, such as employees and machinery.
Service Management – Whether it's contracts, warranties, SLAs or mobile service management, Dynamics 365 Business Central enhances your operational efficiency, provides effective contract management and enforces critical processes - helping to ensure your service team hit SLA's - all of which drives customer loyalty!
Manufacturing – If you make it then Dynamics 365 Business Central can help streamline and manage the production process! Whether you do basic assembly, require full blown MRP or are somewhere in between, we can deliver as much or as little as you need.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Functionality

Dynamics 365 Business Central Implementation

If you’re considering implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central – you’ve come to the right place. A ‘traditional’ ERP implementation process is arduous, complex and worst of all, costly. It often involves a specialist detailing your processes from start to finish in one massive, confusing document. But not with us.

Instead of writing pages and pages on your processes (which you no doubt want to avoid, too), we develop a model of your business within Dynamics 365 Business Central, so you can see exactly what you’ll be getting. With this approach, you get to see a potential solution working in your actual business context with items, suppliers and customers you know. No assumptions. No projections. Just a model you can trust.

To top it off, we have over 20 years of experience with implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central, so you can rest assured that we know what we’re doing! And if you want to make the most of your new system as soon as possible, we even offer free of charge training and support!

That was just a brief explanation of our methodology and why we do it. For a step-by-step guide, please take a look at the below:

Step 1. Demo
To start with, we’ll demonstrate some end-to-end processes in our initial meetings with you. Throughout the assessment process – in which we talk to everyone in your business – we’ll find areas that you don’t have solutions for, or that Business Central doesn’t have as standard. We’ll then develop an appropriate fix for these gaps and then show you how it would work in your business. For us, showing how a solution works is key – and we’ll even use your current data to show you how it would actually work in practice.

Step 2. Day in the Life Workshops
The next step is to show you how the processes we have devised (and Business Central) would work in your business. Of course, there will be some more configuration and development done along the way to show the flow. We’ll use real data (once again) to enable you to understand and visualise these solutions within the context of your business. Everything uses end-to-end flows so you (and your teams) can see how it all fits together!

Step 3. Implementation Phase
Now that everything is in place, we go through the ‘Day in the Life’ processes that we took you through in the previous stages, building on what we’ve shown you and how you want it to work.

Step 4. Day in the Life Playbacks
As we move forward with the project, we use playbacks to clarify and communicate implementation progress. These playbacks help you and the project teams the opportunity to evaluate what’s been done so far, discuss specific requirements or alterations, assess communication needs (you may want stock received to appear on a user’s screen, for example) and validate decisions.

Step 5. User Acceptance Training and Testing
This point is all about training and testing. This stage follows what we’ve developed through stages 1-4, so you’ll be using the system in the same way you do when it’s live. This stage is crucial as it will enable us to understand the integrity of the solution and if it meets your day-to-day operational parameters.

Step 6. Pre-live Playbacks
Hurrah – we are now at the final hurdle, the ‘Are we ready?’ playback! This playback is user-drive and not facilitated by us at The NAV | 365 People. You may be wondering: “Why?” Well, it’s because by this point all your key stakeholders and champions should be able to use the system and capably manage Day in the Life scenarios, i.e. normal operations. If you can’t work through Day in the Life scenarios, then it’s not ready to go live! Once you’re able to go through all your specific scenarios with ease (and without problems), it’s ready to go live! So take a seat, kick back, open a bottle of bubbly and enjoy your brand-new (and seamless) ERP system as it does all the work for you.

Take a look at how the 'Day in the Life' methodology works!

Dynamics 365 Business Central Implementation

Dynamics 365 Business Central Add-ons / Extensions

We believe Dynamics 365 Business Central is the best product on the marketing due to its functionality and flexibility. As with all software, customers often purchase additional products to extend the solution. Areas include: Document Management, Expenses, Reporting, and functional areas such as Credit Control. We took the most common additional user needs and created our own range of Dynamics 365 Business Central extensions, offering that extra extended versatility of your system - we called it nHanced 365!

As well as our own extensions, we work with other third-party partners to provide you with even more Dynamics 365 Business Central add-ons to enhance your system, covering things like Reporting, Expense Management, eCommerce, Mobile, Retail, Warehousing, and much more! The list of partners are limited, and together with The NAV | 365 People, provide you with fully integrated, additional functionality to your system.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing / Pricing

It’s been some time since Microsoft announced their licensing and pricing plans for Dynamics 365 Business Central, and with the last Dynamics NAV licence being cut – where did the word settle in terms of licensing and pricing?

Dynamics 365 Business Central licensing can be broken into two options on a named user basis - Subscription (pay per user, per month, plus includes annual maintenance fee) and Perpetual (the licence is forever yours, you're entitled to access to the latest versions, there's a set number of users). A final thing that may influence your licensing route is where to host your system: on-premise, in your Private Cloud, on a Managed Service, or Microsoft's SaaS (Public Cloud). Dynamics 365 Business Central can be purchased on two levels - Essentials and Premium, and is based on user types 'full' and 'additional'.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Licensing / Pricing

Dynamics 365 Business Central Training

We believe that training is essential if you want to get the most out of your Dynamics 365 Business Central system (and save yourself hours of lost time, headaches and frustration to boot!) The more you understand the functionality of this beautiful product the better you will be able to use it in your organisation and the more you’ll benefit from its genius. That’s why we offer a range of Dynamics 365 Business Central training courses all completely for free, regardless of whether you are one of our customers or not.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Training

So, let’s take a look at what’s on offer!

Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Introduction in a Day: Want to learn more about Dynamics 365 Business Central? This training course is an introduction to the standard Business Central functionality.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Finance 101: This Business Central training course is designed for anyone new to the Finance Department or Finance in general.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Advanced Finance: Our Advanced Finance for Business Central training will further your knowledge of the Finance module and concentrates on the setup side of things as well as periodic activities.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Purchasing 101: Develop your understanding of the Purchasing module with this Business Central training and learn about vendor and item set up, purchase orders, purchase invoices and more!
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Warehouse Management 101: This Warehouse Management Business Central training covers warehouse set up, creating shipments, and processing picks.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Sales & CRM 101: Come to our Business Central training to develop your understanding of the Sales and CRM within Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Training – Manufacturing 101: Develop your understanding of Manufacturing in Business Central with this training. Learn about planning setup, replenishment options, and item costing.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Resources

We offer over 100 completely free Dynamics 365 Business Central resources to help you understand your system & get the most out of it! From our blog to our eBooks, and videos to shortcuts, our hub is full of content from finance to inventory, reporting to warehousing, and even product offerings from our partners.

Here are some of our free resources:

eBooks and Guides
The Ultimate Guide to Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV: Our magazine has anything and everything you ever needed to know about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central & Dynamics NAV.
Dynamics 365 Business Central Keyboard Shortcuts: Want to save time when using Dynamics 365 Business Central? Why not check out our handy keyboard shortcuts!
Dynamics 365 Business Central Version Comparison Table: Our comparison table will help you understand when functionality was introduced into the different versions of Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Webinars
Dynamics 365 Business Central – Standard Reporting: In this webinar, we cover the tools built into Business Central as standard that can aid your reporting journey. We show you how to get your users accessing the data they need to make reporting easier, faster and using the standard functionality already available in Dynamics 365 Business Central. That will include standard reports, Word report layouts and the new Excel report functionalities. We also cover the under-utilised account schedules functionality, as well as how your role centre can become the hub of information for getting your users access to valuable data when and where they need it.
Dynamics 365 Business Central – OData: Discover how you can utilise OData to extract data from your Business Central system and into external reporting tools like Excel and Power BI as well as many other industry standard tools. Available in Business Central, OData is a web service technology that allows you to expose data from within your system so that other tools can understand and read the information.
Dynamics 365 Business Central – V.14 Interface: This webinar will show you the basics of Dynamics 365 Business Central and cover the changes that have been made since Dynamics NAV and RTC.

Blog
Dynamics 365 Business Central CRM module: Do you really need anything else? For a start – what does CRM even mean these days? People have different views on what it is for and when it’s appropriate to use it. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is always one of the modules that is often up for discussion - do you implement a dedicated CRM such as Dynamics CRM (Dynamics 365 for Sales, Field Service and Marketing) or use the built-in functionality in Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Dynamics 365 Business Central development – From the very beginning the core technology that made Dynamics 365 Business Central (or Navision back then) tick has been C/AL. That’s the language that the whole solution is written in, from the core building blocks, like posting routines and tax calculations, all the way up to the custom code written specifically for your business. Microsoft have now given us AL! What can you actually do with AL? Happily, the answer is almost everything that you can do in C/AL.
Top 15 Features of Dynamics 365 Business Central: As well as the performance, reliability and security improvements that are constantly being filtered into the latest versions, our end users will be excited by the brand-new features that will save them time and effort in their daily tasks. Want to know what these fantastic new features are? Read on and see how you or your colleagues can use each of them in your role.
Why Vertical ERP doesn't work: We think economics undermines the future of vertical ERP providers. Check out our thoughts in this blog, using fresh product companies as the example.

Case Studies
The NAV | 365 People help Sweaty Betty pick up their pace: Together with TNP, Sweaty Betty are going to reduce month end from three weeks to five days, and the departments there are already excited to make the move, with lots of engagement across the business.

Dynamics 365 Business Central FAQ

As the top Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central partner and reseller based in the UK & Ireland, we get a lot of questions from prospective and current customers. To give you an idea of what we can do and what we can potentially help with, we’ve compiled some of the questions we most frequently receive:

Can you provide on-site support?
Can you create any bespoke extensions for Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Can you help with upgrading from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central?
What can you offer that other partners can’t?
Can you roll out Dynamics 365 Business Central internationally?
What businesses do you work with?
Do you need anything from me?

Have any other questions about our services or Dynamics 365 Business Central? Check out our handy quick-answer guide covering pricing, upgrading, how it's related to Dynamics NAV and other FAQs.

Dynamics 365 Business Central FAQ

Man reading magazine image on The Ultimate Guide to Dynamics NAV | 365 Business Central slice

The Ultimate Guide to Dynamics 365 Business Central & Dynamics NAV

Now in it's 8th edition our guide has everything you ever needed to know about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV, including:

Upgrading - things to consider
Introduction to Power Platform & Dataverse
C/AL vs AL
H+H Plus TNP - a complex international project scoped and started in a virtual, COVID world through Microsoft Teams

Download the Guide

Dynamics 365 Business Central Support

We provide a full range of Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central services – this includes training, implementation, cloud managed services and Making Tax Digital (MTD). Our team has over 2,300 years of combined experience, making us the number one Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP partner in the UK & Ireland.

Want to find out more about the support we offer? Check out our services below:

Dynamics 365 Business Central Support

Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner

Our company specialises purely in Dynamics 365 Business Central (and associated extensions). It’s all we focus on. Every-single-one of our technical, customer support and sales staff are passionate about this phenomenal Microsoft technology - not just a little – but obsessively! This is one of the many reasons we are the number one Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner in the UK & Ireland!

When it comes to length and breadth of experience, many of us have spent most of our adult lives working with Dynamics 365 Business Central. In fact, the majority of our staff have roles devoted entirely to Dynamics 365 Business Central. This equates to a sensational amount of experience – 2,389 years of combined experience to be exact! (Yes, we’ve actually calculated this!) We’re confident in saying that within our team, we have the expertise and experience to quickly and successfully handle any situation or issue that may arise on a project. Chances are very high that at least one of us has dealt with it before – or something similar.

With over 200 people in the company and over 50 people in our customer support just waiting to deal with your queries and problems, we have someone for every Dynamics 365 Business Central eventuality and are able to support you every step of the way!

Contact us