Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2025 release wave 1

Important

The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers new functionalities that Microsoft plans to deliver to the market from April 2025 to September 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 midsize 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 of operation by selecting apps from industry-leading ISVs and customizing the app to fit their business needs. Business Central is fast to implement and easy to configure. Simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.

In this release, you get AI innovation with intelligent agents. These AI-driven agents integrate with Business Central and bring efficiency and automation to your business operations. The new AI agents understand and perform complex tasks in the Business Central environment. Whether it's generating insightful reports, automating routine processes, or providing real-time assistance, these agents enhance productivity at every level.

One of the standout features of the AI agents is their ability to optimize order creation processes. By leveraging natural language processing, agents can create sales orders directly from email interactions, making the process faster and more intuitive. Agents also play a crucial role in data management. For example, they can assist in creating detailed product information, such as variants and units of measure, to help ensure that your data is accurate and comprehensive. With these advanced capabilities, the agents revolutionize how businesses manage their operations, bringing a new era of efficiency and intelligence to Business Central. The core AI-powered business capabilities continue to improve for this release.

The application focus is on the manufacturing area. The release continues to enhance sustainability management and e-document capabilities. Integrations to Shopify and Dynamics 365 Field Service reach the next level.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 release wave 1

Investment areas

Application
To decide what to include in the application for each release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and consider market trends. For example, we invest in features that help 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. We’re committed to enhancing the Business Central experience by integrating Copilot capabilities that significantly boost productivity in financial data entry tasks.

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

Even in the AI era, our customers trust that their data is safe. World-class security, privacy, and compliance controls protect their data. Microsoft's Responsible AI principles 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.

• Autonomous agents intelligently automate key business processes. For example, the Sales Order Agent handles the intake of 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 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. A rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues. This feature reduces troubleshooting time.

Ecommerce In each release of Business Central, we enhance its integration with Shopify based on customer feedback. With this integration, you can efficiently manage planning, procurement, and product costs. You also gain control over inventory levels across locations and item variants.

When you integrate the apps, you simplify the process of defining prices and discounts. You also simplify managing and reporting taxes to comply with government regulations. Whether you're using Shopify or Shopify Plus, which includes business-to-business capabilities, this integration helps streamline your operations and boost your business efficiency.

Electronic Documents Electronic Documents in Business Central streamlines the process of sending and receiving electronic documents by reducing the need for manual data entry and minimizing errors. This smoother process helps users become more efficient and productive because they can focus on more strategic tasks. Additionally, E-Documents enhances data accuracy and security, ensuring that sensitive information stays protected. Implementing E-Documents in Business Central provides significant time and cost savings and improves overall operational efficiency for businesses.

Financial Management
To determine the Financial Management capabilities in each release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and respond to market trends. For example, we focused on helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes. This focus includes leveraging AI to streamline data entry, automate routine tasks, and provide intelligent insights that enhance decision-making.

Our current focus is on enabling agents to help with tasks related to financial management. For example, agents can help with bookkeeping tasks based on previous patterns or business practices. We want our financial management tools to be robust and adaptable to the diverse needs of our global user base. To meet these needs, we enhance tax management to comply with various international regulations and continuously update Business Central to address the evolving financial landscape.

Governance and administration
We give 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 now easily 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 you more flexibility to schedule upgrades at convenient times. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions (PTEs) along with AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments and saves time for administrators. IPv6 supports future connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security, so your business is ready for a growing, interconnected world.

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 turn complex information into actionable intelligence. These advances reveal hidden patterns and trends, and they uncover 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 data analysis, organizations gain unprecedented insights into the details of their operations and environments. They can innovate in ways that once seemed inconceivable.

As data continues to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements, harnessing its potential is essential for staying competitive. For small and medium-sized businesses, data analysis helps shape a more efficient and sustainable future.

Our reporting strategy focuses on building universal 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.

Service and platform
Users experience fewer interruptions. Business Central generally feels faster, and web services and certain scenarios are noticeably quicker. We continue to invest in the fundamentals of our service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance. This focus lets Business Central grow in scale along with your needs.

The new full-text search on lists, drill-downs, and lookups gives you faster and more accurate access to key data. It focuses only on relevant columns to deliver quicker, targeted results. This improvement boosts productivity and enhances user satisfaction by reducing search time and delivering precise, actionable information. You can still enable the previous search method if you need that flexibility.

The improved job queue flow keeps job order (FIFO) while adding a priority system within job queue categories. This system makes sure that high-priority tasks get handled first. Reduced locking during concurrent warehouse postings lowers bottlenecks. This reduction lets operations run smoothly in high-traffic environments. Automated performance testing in AL-Go for GitHub helps developers find and fix performance issues earlier. With this testing, you get better reliability and improved system performance.

Supply chain management
Supply chain management in Business Central gives you a range of powerful features. These features cover procurement, production, distribution, and logistics. They help businesses streamline operations and improve overall efficiency.

Business Central provides tools for managing the entire supply chain, including inventory management, order processing, and demand forecasting. Businesses can create and manage purchase orders, track inventory levels, and ensure that they deliver products to customers on time. Business Central also supports various supply chain methodologies, so businesses have the flexibility to choose the approach that best suits their operations.

One of the key benefits of using Business Central for supply chain management is its integration with other Microsoft products, such as Power BI and Microsoft Teams. With these integrations, businesses get deeper insights into their supply chain data, help their people collaborate more effectively, and make good decisions based on real-time information.

The investments for the supply chain management area focus on quality management and subcontracting.

Sustainability Management
We continuously expand key parts of the Sustainability Management capabilities in Business Central to align with customer feedback and evolving regulatory demands.

Collect sustainability data

• Capture environmental data using sustainability journals and purchase documents, either manually or through formulas.
• Monitor emissions, water usage, and waste intensity across companies, countries, regions, or facilities. You can also purchase carbon credits directly within Business Central.
• Import emission factors from external sources through open APIs to keep calculations accurate and reliable.
• Use Copilot to help estimate your carbon footprint, even when the system doesn't yet have available emission factors.

Track your progress

• Use the modern Sustainability Role Center to access all sustainability data and key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place.
• Set baselines and targets, and track your progress with scorecards and goal management tools.

Gain insights and simplify reporting

• Access built-in reports, Excel-based reporting, embedded Power BI dashboards, and analysis views tailored to your sustainability data.
• Use financial reports to compare sustainability entries with statistical or general ledger data.
• Report on various greenhouse gases in CO₂ equivalents, as well as water and waste metrics.
• Customize reports to focus on the sustainability indicators that matter most to your business.
• Meet regulatory requirements by reporting in line with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other standards through integration with External ESG Reporting.
• Calculate and report data required for Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) compliance.

Enhance brand reputation

• Use the integrated sustainability features in Business Central to track Scope 3 emissions across all operations.
• Add carbon footprint data to product invoices to promote transparency and accountability.

These capabilities give you a comprehensive approach to sustainability management. They help you measure, analyze, and report your environmental impact with confidence and efficiency.

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 you need them.

Each 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 view summarized data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.

To learn more about the capabilities we're delivering during this release wave, see the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central:

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 released to the market. For the complete list, see all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that application administrators 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.