Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2024 release wave 2

Important

The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities that Microsoft plans to deliver to the market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you see the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Overview

Business Central is a business management application for small and mid-sized organizations that automates and streamlines business processes. Highly scalable and adaptable with a rich set of capabilities, Business Central enables companies to manage their finances, supply chain, manufacturing, projects, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that's relevant to their specific industry or region by choosing apps from industry-leading ISVs and customizing the app to fit their business needs. You can implement Business Central quickly and configure it easily. Simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.

This release shows our commitment to Copilot. We continue to explore how Copilot can help optimize business processes so you can complete tasks faster. We enable Copilot to help with creating sales orders directly from chat. Plus, we make it faster to create product information with Business Central by using Copilot to create information like variant, unit of measure, and other details. We're also investing in piloting chat extensibility to help users learn from third-party content.

Developers already improve their productivity with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. More innovation is coming from these world-leading development tools for AL developers. We also enable developers to enrich the application metadata with more details to use for a better Copilot experience.

By automating regulatory tasks, you can help your organization focus on its primary business while staying compliant with various government regulations. Expanding core functionality is always a focus. This release enables customers to use installments on sales documents. To support customers with international business, this release enables support for multiple VAT numbers.

Additional updates in 2024 release wave 2 include:

• Application: Our e-document feature provides more capabilities for sending documents. The last release offered integration between projects in Business Central and Dynamics 365 Field Service. In this release, we're expanding this integration to cover service orders in Business Central. We also deliver more reporting capabilities for sustainability to help companies track their greenhouse gas emissions for reporting.

• Country and regional: We've expanded Business Central's global availability. Business Central is now available in more than 170 countries and regions.

• Development: We continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers who work with GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and the AppSource marketplace. We add new code refactoring capabilities, an easy path to functional and performance testing, and ISV and custom code with AL GO for GitHub.

• Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of self-service features that help administrators manage access to environments at a granular level and audit critical admin operations by using Microsoft 365 Audit Log. Audit Log provides strong options for reinforcing data privacy with customer-managed encryption keys and Azure Lockbox.

• Legislation: We continue to ensure that Business Central complies with local accounting laws by making improvements to Microsoft's localized versions.

• Reporting and data analysis: We add more than 70 Power BI reports and continue to invest in our overall reporting capabilities.

• Service and platform: We continue to invest in the fundamentals of our service. We focus on high availability, performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Adapt faster with Power Platform
Business Central seamlessly integrates with Power Platform, so you can improve efficiency in your organization by automating repetitive tasks. Use Power Automate templates to automate workflows that optimize your processes for your unique requirements.

We continue to invest in tight integration with Power Platform to make it more powerful and give you more ways to use your business data effectively. For example, you can use the Copilot capabilities for cloud flows in the Power Platform products to create connected business workflows and experiences. You can do so through quick and easy natural language expressions.

Application
To determine what goes into the application in every release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and respond to market trends. For example, we invest in helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes.

In recent releases, we invested in multicompany capabilities because more businesses use Business Central across borders and to manage multiple companies. By integrating Copilot capabilities, we enhance the Business Central experience and boost productivity in financial data entry tasks.

Copilot and agents
Business Central is the comprehensive, AI-powered application for small to medium-sized organizations that want to scale their business with AI automation. With Business Central, you can eliminate tedious tasks and simplify work with powerful, generative AI. We support our customers' AI transformation and empower our diverse partner community to bring industry expertise to this mission.

Even in the AI era, our customers trust that their data is safe. Business Central protects data with world-class security, privacy, and compliance controls. It follows Microsoft's Responsible AI principles that put people at the center of the experience.

• Microsoft Copilot is the AI-powered assistant that improves efficiency, boosts creativity, and eliminates tedious tasks. With your Business Central license, everyone gets a copilot at no extra cost. Copilot in Business Central has an ever-growing set of skills to guide, find, compare, analyze, suggest, and summarize. Assistive features such as chat, and task-specific features such as bank account reconciliation assistance, are ready to use with no complex setup or training. The features are seamlessly integrated to reduce or eliminate the need to switch between applications.

• Deploy autonomous agents that intelligently automate key business processes. For example, use the Sales Order Agent that handles sales orders from emails and attachments, interprets unstructured data, and generates accurate sales documents. With just a few clicks to configure and activate, these built-in agents are ready to run. They offer extensive oversight capabilities so you can review and approve activity, ensuring control while reducing manual effort.

• For makers and pro developers, Business Central gives you the flexibility to add custom AI solutions and connect to the broader Microsoft cloud of AI-powered apps and services.

Copilot and agents are available only for Business Central online customers.

Country and regional
Business Central is available to businesses in more countries and regions. This expansion happens largely through partner-led localizations. Our partners create and maintain apps for specific countries and regions, and publish their apps on AppSource. In combination with built-in language offerings, Business Central serves customers in more than 170 countries and regions worldwide. Additionally, in the countries where Microsoft is responsible for the localization, we provide updates for all regulatory features.

Development
With these releases, we bring powerful new extensibility features that empower developers to create adaptable, resource-efficient solutions while offering greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs.

With the new ability to define profile extension objects, you can modify and customize user profiles without duplicating code. This feature enhances productivity and helps maintain code integrity. You can now include resources in extensions and access them from AL, which streamlines data initialization and setup. Enhancements to the Explore in Visual Studio Code feature provide seamless access to GitHub repositories. You can easily pull, inspect, or hotfix code versions, even when IP protection is in place. By using full-text search metadata on table fields, you can offer data search capabilities that deliver faster, more accurate results to boost user satisfaction and efficiency.

To save time when validating solutions, resellers and publishers can run multiple AppSource apps through a public NuGet feed that provides downloadable symbols. AL-Go for GitHub handles this automation. Also, a rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues. This feature reduces troubleshooting time.

Governance and administration We're giving Business Central administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. With these tools, administrators can solve their customers' needs and handle a variety of administrative scenarios.

New features in Business Central improve security, flexibility, and partner management for customers with multiple environments. Administrators can assign partner access to specific environments, which simplifies control and compliance. Customer-managed encryption keys enhance data protection and help businesses meet privacy standards. Extended update windows give businesses more flexibility to schedule upgrades. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions (PTEs) and AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments and saves time for administrators. IPv6 supports connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security.

Legislation Business Central updates regulatory features to meet popular requests and changing requirements from local authorities. To give customers peace of mind and help them focus on their core business, Business Central automates many processes and ensures that features comply with government regulations. For example, if local regulations require vouchers as proof of transactions and a detailed audit trail, you can automate the process. Business Central automatically generates and attaches vouchers to general ledger entries. Accountants can be confident they're compliant without extra steps. With the retention policy features, you specify how long to store vouchers before you remove them. You get more control over the data you store.

We're working to make regulatory features a standard part of Business Central. With this approach, you get improvements that are ready to use across the countries and regions where they're relevant. For example, the E-documents module is a foundation that supports processes for sales and purchase invoicing. Partners can easily extend this module by building country-specific apps for e-invoicing.

Reporting and data analysis
In today's world, data is an invaluable resource. It forms the foundation of decision-making and progress across all sectors. Recent advances in AI technology and data analytics tools bring radically new ways for businesses to distill complex information into actionable intelligence. These tools reveal hidden patterns and trends, and they find correlations that were previously concealed. The critical insights gained from data analysis empower organizations to optimize their strategies, enhance customer experiences, and identify potential risks. With these insights, organizations gain unprecedented views into the details of their operations and environments. They can innovate in ways that were once inconceivable.

As data fuels innovation and drives transformative advancements, it's essential for small and medium-sized businesses to harness its potential. Staying competitive means shaping a more efficient and sustainable future.

Our reporting strategy focuses on building universal business intelligence (BI) and analytics within the Business Central experience. We aim to seamlessly integrate in-context, rich, and immersive BI and analytics content from first and third parties into Business Central. Alongside flexible self-service capabilities, you can effortlessly access and leverage your data for maximum value.

User experiences
Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces that enable you to work with your data from anywhere and on any device. User interfaces include an installable desktop app, a browser-based web app, and mobile apps. Whether you need to enter data at high speed, casually update entries, or analyze relational data, Business Central offers numerous features that are easy to get started with and powerful when needed.

Every release includes enhancements to usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability. In this release wave, we boost efficiency when you work with actions across selections in lists of records and when you view summarized data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.

To learn more about the capabilities delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central in the following section:

Check out the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
Application administrators review user-impacting features. This review process helps manage release changes and supports successful onboarding of new capabilities. For the complete list, see all features tagged Users, automatically in the release plan.

Features that application administrators must enable
This release wave includes features that administrators, makers, or business analysts must enable or configure for their users. For the complete list, see all features tagged Users by admins, makers, or analysts in the release plan.

Get the most out of Business Central

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Learn how to license Business Central.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Business Central.
User community	Engage with Business Central experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Business Central.