Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2023 release wave 1
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.
Important
The 2023 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2023 to September 2023. In this article, you'll find 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 adaptable and rich with features, Business Central enables companies to manage their finances, supply chain, manufacturing, shipping, project management, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that's relevant to their region of operation, and customize the app to support highly-specialized industries. Business Central is fast to implement, easy to configure, and simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.
The 2023 release wave 1 improves support for managing multiple companies, including improvements to the intercompany features. This release reduces the time it takes to onboard customers by creating seamless onboarding experiences that are supported by quality content from Microsoft and our partners. We'll help organizations stay compliant with various government regulations by providing features that automate regulatory tasks, so organizations can focus on their primary business. For example, we'll add support for non-deductible VAT in our W1 version and then, in phases, add it to Microsoft country versions that support VAT. Usability is always a focus, and in this release we'll boost efficiency when working with lists of records. You can personalize columns by adding any field from the table, use bulk actions on multiple rows, and get more comprehensive views to work faster and smarter.
We're investing in the productivity of developers and consultants by introducing Visual Studio Code AL Explorer, which offers seamless collaboration on development through GitHub and adds self-service capabilities for administrators who manage apps and environments. We'll also enable our ISVs to perform transactions through the AppSource marketplace.
Additional updates in 2023 release wave 1 include:
Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform: It's easier to set up approval workflows in Business Central so that people can be more productive by automating more of their processes. Additionally, we're delivering sample apps to help Power Apps makers get started faster.
Application: In the financials area, we're investing in intercompany capabilities and enabling the possibility for general ledger settlement. All countries will be able to export SAF-T audit files. The supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements that let you run your inventory and warehouse processes more efficiently.
Country and regional: More countries and regions are added to bring Business Central to more than 100 countries and regions.
Development: We've moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, where we continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers. For example, Visual Studio Code Visual Designers lets consultants create simple, per-customer extensions. Developers are also getting better compiler resource management and code analyzer performance. We're modernizing the permissions system to make it easier for developers to define and maintain permissions that are easy to understand.
Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of additional self-service features to help administrators manage their environments.
Legislation: This release enables support for non-deductible VAT in the W1 version, which we'll upgrade to country versions in upcoming minor releases.
Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive use of the application faster thanks to improved in-app guidance and user assistance.
Productive with Microsoft 365: We're improving the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams.
Reporting and data analysis: We're adding a new mode on list pages to enable users to analyze and pivot data directly in the client.
Service and platform: We're continuing to invest in the fundamentals of our service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 release wave 1
Investment areas
User experiences
Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces enabling our customers to work with their data, from anywhere and on any device, including an installable desktop app, browser web application, and mobile apps. Whether users need to enter data at high speed, casually update their 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 2023 release wave 1, we boost efficiency when working with actions and lists of records. We also empower customers and consultants to personalize the fields on a page by choosing from existing table fields, reducing the time and effort to optimize their workspace.
Application
Application spans the functional capabilities of Business Central and contains the features that help customers manage their businesses. In 2023 release wave 1, we're continuing to modernize our financial and operations processes to give our customers more advanced features as they grow their businesses.
Accounting processes for multiple companies
In the financial management area, we're focusing on making it easier to manage accounting tasks for multiple companies in an intercompany setup. The Intercompany Postings feature has been improved to make it easier to set up, get a better overview, and make the intercompany transaction processes more seamless and flexible.
Accounting period-end processes and analysis
In addition to dimensions, you can add data for analytics using Statistical Accounts. Statistical accounts let you enter numerical data for general ledger (G/L) transactions that you can use for analyses.
When you manage the accounting for businesses that have a high volume of transactions, it's now easier to get an overview of progress in the period-end process. The G/L Settlement allows bookkeepers to apply general ledger entries during reconciliation tasks.
Inventory and warehouse scenarios
We're continuing to work on various aspects of our inventory features. We've improved the set-up and demo data that we provide, and made it simpler to configure inventory features. We have a better data migration story, and we're continuing to make processes seamless in different areas. For example, we're building out our warehouse and item tracking capabilities.
Continuous customer-requested improvements
This release also contains several features and feature enhancements that we implemented in response to some great ideas that our community has submitted on our aka.ms/bcideas page.
Development
Developers are in high demand, and we want to continue to attract and raise the productivity of Business Central AL developers. We continue to focus on developing features that enable developers to work more efficiently. We also empower consultants, citizen developers, and users to do more to offload developers, increase agility, and lower cost of changes.
In this release wave, we continue the investment in our Visual Studio Code experience by adding visual abstractions on top of AL code, empowering developers and consultants to easily get an overview of, and navigate across, all the AL objects in a workspace or project. This helps understand the application boundaries better and easily jump to source or run objects. Developers are getting better compiler resource management and code analyzer performance, and the ability to attach with the normal debugger to user sessions.
We also empower AppSource publishers to release preview apps for select customers, have better runtime package handling, and monetize their apps via AppSource Marketplace. Finally, customers get the ability to add existing table fields to existing pages as no-code personalization or customization.
Service and platform
In this release we continue to relentlessly invest in the fundamentals of our service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security and compliance. This will allow Business Central to continue to grow in scale with our customers' needs.
With this release we are working to further enhance the stability of sign-ins for interactive users and the number of user session interruptions. We also plan to further improve client-side page rendering time across all our page types and controls to make the client even more responsive. We will improve the performance of cold start OData calls, which will benefit clients based on web services, such as Teams, warehouse scanners, Dataverse apps, and other integrations. We will further optimize our language (AL) runtime to minimize database locking and tune frequently used application scenarios (country-specific regulatory reports, renumbering General Journal entries, Item Tracking, Reservation Entries, and calculating inventory availability).
Reporting and data analysis
Data first is a guiding principle for reporting in Business Central. This wave offers features and capabilities that give you access to all your data in an easily consumable way. In a world of big data, predictive analytics reporting is no longer a set of predefined reports to cover a historical view of the business, but how you organize and use your data to react to key events, big and small, to optimize the business.
This release provides enhanced analysis capabilities by letting you group, filter, and pivot data on lists directly in Business Central.
If you want to check your numbers or create simple reports, you can enable data analysis on any list and start analyzing data by using one or more analysis tabs. Each analysis tab gives you a range of options:
- Choose the columns to show
- Use date hierarchies
- Set data filters
- Pivot your data
- Mark cells for quick statistics
- Export data
The analysis tabs are saved on the list, so you can use them whenever you want.
Legislation
In 2023 release wave 1, we deliver legislation updates based on the most popular requests for improvement in this area. We’re providing legislation automation and features that are compliant with the various regulations set by government agencies, so users can focus on their primary business. We plan to take a step toward standardizing functionality so that all these improvements are delivered as standard capabilities across all supported countries and regions where relevant.
The main focus of the legislative effort in this release wave is on non-deductible VAT in the base application. Both features are available in some localizations but are required in almost all regions. They will be standardized and made extendable so partners can easily extend them if necessary.
Country and regional
Expansion to more countries and regions is achieved through partner-led localization. Our partners create relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more countries and regions worldwide.
More countries and regions are added to bring Business Central to more than 130 countries. Additionally, Microsoft provides all regulatory feature updates to countries where Microsoft is responsible for the localization.
Productive with Microsoft 365
People work smarter and teams perform better when business apps are combined with productivity apps. Business Central seamlessly integrates with best-in-class Microsoft 365 apps and services such as Outlook, Excel, Word, OneDrive, and Teams to bring data into the flow of work.
The current capabilities include:
- Respond to inquiries faster by attaching quotes and invoices from Outlook.
- Share, analyze, or bulk-edit records in Excel.
- Start a conversation about a record in Teams or rally the team around key datapoints.
- View, share, and co-author business documents using OneDrive for Business.
- Author beautiful reports and other templates in Word.
The 2023 release wave 1 builds upon our collaborative apps story in Microsoft Teams to drive broader product engagement and access to data across the organization.
This release will focus on:
- Enhanced adaptive cards in Teams with an optimized thumbnail view and better permission experience.
- New settings page for configuring security control for Teams Cards.
Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform
In 2023 release wave 1, we continue to improve the way Business Central integrates with Power Platform. We continue to offer features that make it easier for Business Central users to get started and gain efficiency working with Power Platform.
In this release it will be easier to set up approval workflows from within Business Central, helping users automate more of their processes and be more productive.
Additionally, we will deliver sample apps to help all Power App makers get started faster with their Power App development. We will also make it easier to distribute enabled makers to build more portable Power Apps and Power Automate flows by allowing flexibility for environments and companies. This will enable partners and customers to experience rich Power Apps and Power Automate flows.
Onboarding
Onboarding quickly to a cloud-based solution like Dynamics 365 Business Central can have a significant impact on a company's bottom line. By getting up to speed in a short amount of time, companies reduce costs and improve their overall financial performance. Fast adoption to Business Central makes it easier for companies to make informed decisions, respond to changing market conditions, and drive their business forward.
Business Central offers a unique opportunity for companies to self-onboard with a customized trial that's tailored for their business domain. The customized trial not only streamlines the implementation process, but also allows partners to scale their businesses. By enabling businesses to self-onboard, partners save time and resources that would have been spent on traditional onboarding assistance, freeing up resellers to focus on growing their customer base and giving consultants more time to provide their specialized knowledge.
A successful self-onboarding experience also helps build trust and establishes a positive relationship between the company and the reseller, leading to repeat business and referrals. With the ability to create customized trial experiences, partners can demonstrate their expertise in Dynamics 365 Business Central and highlight the specific value that the solution can deliver to each customer.
This release wave continues investments from previous waves in adding Banking Connectivity apps to the in-product listing of core business productivity booster solutions from ISVs, so organizations can realize the power of choosing a cloud solution and the connected experiences they expect.
Governance and administration
We are supplying administrators of Business Central with the tools they need to manage their environment and apps. The goal is for administrators to be self-sufficient, able to solve their customer needs, and handle a wide variety of administrative scenarios.
In this release we add even more capabilities to drive self-service and automation. Administrators can transfer environments from one organization to another in a controlled way while preserving the data. We will be adding options to manage updates to ISV apps and will introduce the ability to manage per-tenant extensions in the admin center in addition to ISV apps. Idle sandbox environments will expire after 45 days of inactivity to free up capacity for creating new environments. Administrators can choose to opt out of the expiration period. We will enhance the tool that performs the migration of Business Central data from on-premises to the cloud. Administrators will gain additional capabilities to deal with customizations and the ability to include or exclude tables during the migration process.
Copilot and AI innovation
According to our recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. But until today, AI has been a commodity that few SMBs could truly invest in.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot enables professionals to perform their day-to-day work with the assistance of cutting-edge AI by their side. With Copilot in Business Central, our customers empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort, without needing to become data scientists.
The 2023 release wave 1 introduces our first Copilot capability: AI-generated product descriptions, adding to our catalog of AI-powered features such as cash flow forecasting and late payment prediction.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for 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. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of 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. |